The model tenementers affect a lofty indifference to this high rank; also to the slum-dwellers who confer it. They affect an even loftier indifference to the existence of the newer model tenements in the East End Avenue and John Jay Park neighborhoods. When comparisons are instituted between these more modern, more luxurious structures and their own, the Lorillarders smile superiorly and say: "Let Kips Bay renegades with a sneaking preference for uptown respectability migrate to John Jay Park, or better still, to Hell Gate! We want no truck with them. The one and only Lorillard speaks for itself."
If you probe further they will ask you to lift up your eyes at night to their electrically lighted pagoda roof and then tell them why they should not be content to be "a twinkling model set in a sea of slums." No. Impossible to get them excited by sly disparagements or open comparisons.
Impossible, that is, unless your comparison brings in Greenwich Village. Dare to assert that the model tenement district reminds you of Greenwich Village or the Latin Quarter of Paris, and you will encounter an explosion. You will learn to your sorrow that the cold model tenementer is not cold at all, that he is a volcano covered with a very little snow.
He will bombard you with: "Greenwich Village me eye! Liken us to a fake Bohemia, to a near-beer substitute for the Parisian Latin Quarter! Say, where did you get that stuff? We don't imitate the Latin Quarter or any other foreign quarter. We are an American quarter. We are the Kips Bay model tenement quarter—and that is all there is to it."
He will swear that the differences between Greenwich Village and Kips Bay are too numerous to record. He will challenge you to scour the Village for a parallel to the Kips Bay Outlaw Club with its professional news-faker for president, its one-legged gunman for sergeant-at-arms, and its purser-of-a-pirate-ship for treasurer.
True, he may admit a superficial resemblance in the matter of devotion to art. But he will point out that the artistic set in Greenwich Village is almost the whole village, whereas the artistic set in the model tenements is but a small part of Kips Bay. He will assure you that: "The Village takes up Love for Love's Sake and Art for Art's Sake. We have no use for that kind of bunk. We take up Art and Love for the sake of anything and everything but Love and Art; for the sake of politics or money, or just for the sake of excitement."
The way the purser-of-the-pirate-ship expresses the difference is: "We go in more for powder than for paint."
By powder he means gunpowder.
II
It was in these Lorillard tenements (named after Westing Lorillard, the well-known brewer and philanthrophist who endowed them) that Cornelia Covert and Mazie Ross occupied apartment number fifteen, (two bedrooms, kitchen and bath). And it was by a ring of number fifteen's bell that Claude Fontaine was cut short.