New York (State) -- Social life and customs -- Fiction
Kedzie ordered unfamiliar things for the sake of educating her
illiterate mid-Western stomach. She ordered clam chowder and Hamburger
steak, spaghetti Italienne, lobster salad, and Neapolitan ice-cream. She
ate too much--much too much.
The total bill was ninety-five cents, and she was terrified. She had
thought her father a miser for complaining of the breakfast bill of
eleven-odd dollars at the Biltmore, but that was his money, not hers.
When she finished her meal she did not dream of tipping the waiter. He
seemed not to expect it, but he grinned as he asked her to come again.
He hoped she would. He went to the door and stared after her, sadly,
longingly. The dishes she had left he carried away with an elegiac
solemnity.
The streets were darkened now and the lights bewildered Kedzie. The town
grew more solemn. It withdrew into itself. People were going home.
Kedzie did not know where to go. She walked for fear of standing still.
The noise fatigued her. She turned west to escape it and found a little
park at 161st Street.
Many streets flowed thence. There were ten ways to follow, and she could
not choose one among them.
She was pretty, but she had not learned the commercial value of her
beauty. She was alone in the great, vicious city, but nobody had
threatened her. Nearly everybody had paid her charm the tribute of a
stare or a smile, but nobody had been polite enough to flatter her with
a menace.
She was very pretty. But then there are so very many very pretty girls
in every big city! June with her millions of exquisite roses is no
richer in beauty than New York. Yet even New York cannot keep all her
beauties supplied with temptation and peril all the time.
Kedzie sat on the bench wondering which of the ten ways to go. It turned
late, but she could not decide. She began to be a little hungry again,
but she was always that, and she told her ever-willing young stomach
that her late luncheon would have to be an early dinner.
As she sat still, people began to peer at her through the enveiling
dark. A tipsy brewery truck-driver who had absorbed too much of his own
cargo sank down by her side. He could not see Kedzie through the froth
in his brain, but she found him fearful. When he began to talk to
himself she fled.
She saw a brilliantly lighted street-car, and she boarded it. She was
all turned around, and the car twisted and turned as it proceeded. She
did not realize that it was going north till she heard the conductor
calling in higher and higher street numbers. Then she understood, with
tired wrath, that she was outbound once more. She wanted to go toward
the heart of town, but she could not afford to get off without her
nickel's worth of ride.
The car was all but empty when the conductor called to a drowsy old
lady, his penultimate passenger:
“Hunneran Semty-seckin! Hey, lady! You ast me to leave you off at
Hunneran Semty-seckin, didn't yah?”
The woman was startled from her reverie and gasped:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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