Then she arose and said “good-night,” leaving Percy-Bartlett to such comfort as he could derive from his thoughts and his tobacco.
CHAPTER XVI.
It was Saturday night at La Ria’s. John Fenton and Richard Stoughton were seated side by side near one end of the room, awaiting with true La Rian patience the coming of the soup. No one who is in a hurry ever goes to La Ria’s on Saturday night. Impatience is sacrilege in that Bohemian republic that lies under the sidewalk on a down-town street, and draws into its charming boundaries many of the brightest men and most attractive women in the city. La Ria’s is both a pleasure and a protest. The pleasure is on the surface, the protest is underneath. The former is what the true La Rian feels, the latter is what he thinks. His presence on Saturday evening in that famous restaurant proves his unwillingness to permit the New World’s metropolis to become nothing but a colorless aggregation of very wealthy and very poor citizens. La Ria’s furnishes an outlet both to the rich and poor for the inherent fondness in men and women for the picturesque and unconventional.
There is nothing attractive in this low-ceilinged room, blue with cigarette-smoke even before the soup is served; but if you ask the loyal La Rian if he would have the “historic banquet-hall”—as an enthusiastic reporter once called it—changed in any important particular, he would look at you in scorn. Raise the ceiling, decorate the walls, put in mirrors and gilding and rugs and a costly service, and the broken-hearted La Rians would file sorrowfully out into the night, bewailing the moment when money had thrown its fatal blight over the one spot in the city where the millionnaire sinks into insignificance when he comes to dine with the poet and the artist and the journalist, and where, once a week at least, there is “a feast of reason and a flow of soul.”
“There is a fascination about this sort of thing that is irresistible,” whispered Richard to John Fenton, as he sipped his claret after the dinner had been fairly started and gazed around him in delight. He was still young enough and sufficiently unsophisticated to enjoy the glamour of his surroundings without looking beneath the surface, and seeing there the life-tragedies that the actors in the scene before him concealed under the mask of gayety. His eye caught the smiling glance of a dark-haired girl, with classically regular features and a delicately shaped hand, who raised her wine-glass as she returned his smile and seemed to pledge his health with the utmost goodfellowship. She sat at a table half-way down the room, and had been laughing and chatting with several men wearing Van Dyke beards, one of whom, Richard learned later, was a famous painter of perfectly innocuous landscapes—a man who looked like Mephistopheles, but said his prayers before retiring.
“Be careful, Richard,” remarked Fenton good-naturedly; “she’s a beautiful girl, but very dangerous.”
The young man glanced up at his friend laughingly.
“You brought me here, John. You are responsible for the consequences.”
“Am I my brother’s keeper?” asked the elder man solemnly. “You are old enough, Richard, to take care of yourself, I suppose. I wash my hands of the whole affair.”