"Tea at the Plaza is so satisfactory and so restful," she says, as you dodge to permit two ladies—one in gray silk and the other in a cut of blue cloth that gives her the contour of a magnified frog—to slip past you without knocking your tea out of your untrained fingers. "We might have gone to the Manhattan—but it's so filled with young girls and the chappies from the schools—the Ritz is proper but dull, so is Sherry's—all the rest more or less impossible."
She rattles on—the matter of restaurants is always dear to the New York heart. You ignore the details.
"But why?" you demand.
"Why what?" she returns.
"Why tea?"
You explain that afternoon tea in its real lair—London—in a sort of climatic necessity. The prevalence of fog, of raw damp days, makes a cup of hot tea a real bracer—a stimulant that carries the human through another two or three hours of hard existence until the late London dinner. The bracing atmosphere of New York—with more clear days than any other metropolitan city in the world—does not need tea. You say so frankly.
"I suppose you are right," Katherine concedes, "but we have ceased in this big city to rail at the English. We bow the knee to them. The most fashionable of our newest hotels and shops run—absurdly many times—to English ways. And afternoon tea has long since ceased to be a novelty in our lives. Why, they are beginning to serve it at the offices downtown—just as they do in dear old London."
You swallow hard—some one has recommended that to you as a method of suppressing emotion—for polite society is never emotional.
V
Dinner is New York's real function of the day. And dinner in New York means five million hungry stomachs demanding to be filled. The New York dinner is as cosmopolitan as the folk who dwell on the narrow island of Manhattan and the two other islands that press closely to it. The restaurant and hotel dinners are as cosmopolitan as the others. Of course, for the sake of brevity, if for no other reason, you must eliminate the home dinners—and read "home" as quickly into the cold and heavy great houses of the avenue as into the little clusters of rooms in crowded East Side tenements where poverty is never far away and next week's meals a real problem. And remember, that to dine even in a reasonably complete list of New York's famous eating places—a new one every night—would take you more than a year. At the best your vision of them must be desultory.