As she crossed the threshold, a man seated at one of the larger tables looked up.
"My dear girl," he said, reproachfully, "lateness for dinner at The Gotham entails serious consequences. We were just planning a search-party."
His right-hand neighbor spoke warningly. "Don't believe him, Miss Musin; he refused to get uneasy until he had finished his dinner."
"When one is empty," retorted the first, "one can't get even uneasy. Anxiety can't be produced from a void."
The girl nodded good-evening, took her seat, and unfolded her napkin. The first gentleman passed her the butter, the second the water-bottle. The first was named Nevins. He was fair and pallid, with a long face that would have been round had nature supplied gratification as well as instinct. His shoulders were high and narrow, suggesting the perpetual shrug with which he met his fate. He was starving upon an artistic career. The second gentleman—Mr. Sellars—was sleek and middle-aged. Providence had intended him for a poet; life had made of him a philosopher—and a plumber. He was still a man of sentiment.
At the head of the table sat Mr. Paul—an apostle of pessimism, whose general flavor marked the pessimist rather than the apostle. The peculiarity of his face was its construction—the features which should have gone up coming down, and the features which should have come down going up. Perhaps had Mr. Paul himself moralized upon the fact, which is not likely, he would have concluded that it was merely a physical expression of his mental attitude towards the universe. He had long since arrived at the belief that whatever came in life was the thing of all others which should have kept away, and its coming was sufficient proof of its inappropriateness. He had become a pessimist, not from passion, but from principle. He had chosen his view of the eternal condition of things as deliberately as he would have selected the glasses with which to survey a given landscape. Having made his choice, he stood to it. No surreptitious favors at the hands of Providence were able to modify his honest conviction of its general unpleasantness.
The remaining persons at this particular table were of less importance. There was Miss Ramsey, the journalist, who was pretty and faded and harassed, and who ate her cold dinner, to which she usually arrived an hour late, in exhausted silence. Miss Ramsey was one whom, her friends said, adversity had softened; but Miss Ramsey herself knew that the softness of adversity is the softness of decay. There was Mr. Ardly, a handsome young fellow, who did the dramatic column of a large daily, and who regarded life as a gigantic jag, facing failure with facetiousness and gout with inconsequence. There was Mr. Morris, who was thin, and Mr. Mason, who was fat, and Mr. Hogarth, who was neither.
The restaurant consisted of a long and queerly shaped room. It had originally been divided into two apartments, but when the house had passed into the present management the partition had been torn down, and two long and narrow tables marked the line where the division had been. The walls were dingy and unpapered. Where the plaster was of an unusual degree of smokiness, several cheap chromos, in cheaper frames, had been hung, like brilliant patches laid upon a dingy background. Above the chromos lingered small bunches of evergreen—faded and dried remnants of the last holiday season—and from the tarnished and fly-specked chandelier hung a withered spray of mistletoe.
The room was crowded. There was not so much as a vacant seat at the tables. The hum of voices passed through the doors and into the rumble of the street without. In a far corner a lady in a blouse of geranium pink was engaged in catching reckless flies for the sustenance of the chameleon upon her breast; nearer at hand a gentleman was polishing his plate and knife with his napkin. It was warm and oppressive, and the voices sounded shrilly through the glare. The girl whom they had called "Miss Musin" looked up with absent-minded abruptness.
"I had as soon wear wooden shoes as eat with a pewter fork!" she remarked, irritably.