"I don't quite see—" the young man began, hesitatingly.
"Oh, I can explain what I want," Rupert de Ruyter interrupted. "You see, I'm a New-Yorker born, as you are, and I've lived here all my life, and I know the city pretty well—that is, I know certain aspects of it thoroughly. I can do the Patriarchs, or a Claremont tea, or any other function of the smart set; I know the way men talk in clubs; I've studied the painters and the literary men and the journalists; I can describe a first night at the theatre or a panic in the Street; but I've pretty nearly exhausted the people I know, and I thought I would come down here and get introduced to a set I didn't know."
"I shall be glad to take you to the Settlement," Suydam responded, "and—"
"It isn't the Settlement I want, thank you," De Ruyter interrupted. "The people in the Settlement are variants of types I know already. The people I want to meet are people I don't know anything about—the very poor people, the tenement-house people, the people who work for the sweaters. Do you know any of those?"
"Yes," Suydam answered, "I know many of them. But they are not half so picturesque and so pathetic as the sensational newspapers make them out. Wouldn't you rather go and see the Chinese quarter?"
"That isn't what I want," the novelist made answer. "The Chinese quarter is barbarous; it is exotic; it is extraneous; it is a mere accidental excrescence on New York. But the tenement-house people have come to stay; they are an integral and a vital part of the city. I don't care about Chinatown, and I do care about Mulberry Bend. Now, Suydam, you know Mulberry Bend, don't you?"
"Yes," Suydam returned. "I know Mulberry Bend."
"Do you know any tenement-house in the Bend, or near it, which is characteristic—which is typical of the worst that the Bend has to show?" De Ruyter asked.
"Yes," Suydam responded again. "I think I could find a tenement of that kind."
"Then take me there now, if you can spare me an hour or two," said the novelist.