As I say, the boys was all more cheerful and contemptuous about New York by this time. Ben had spent another day asking casual parties if they was born in New York and having no more luck than a rabbit, but it seemed like he'd got hardened to these disappointments. He said he might leave his own self to a museum in due time, so future generations would know at least what the male New Yorker looked like. As for the female, he said any of these blondes along Broadway could be made to look near enough like his mate by a skilled taxidermist. Jeff Tuttle here says that they wasn't all blondes because he'd seen a certain brunette that afternoon right in this palm grill that was certainly worth preserving for all eternity in the grandest museum on earth—which showed that Jeff had chirked up a lot since landing in town. Ben said he had used the term "blonde" merely to designate a species and they let it go at that.
Lon Price then said he'd been talking a little himself to people he met in different places and they might not be born New Yorkers but they certainly didn't know anything beyond the city limits. At this he looks around at the crowded tables in this palm grill and says very bitterly that he'll give any of us fifty to one they ain't a person in the place that ever so much as even heard of Price's Addition to Red Gap. And so the talk went for a little, with Jake Berger ever and again crooning to the waiter for another round of stingers. I'd had two, so I stayed out on the last round. I told Jake I enjoyed his hospitality but two would be all I could think under till they learned to leave the dash of chloroform out of mine. Jake just looked kindly at me. He's as chatty as Mount McKinley.
But I was glad to see the boys more cheerful, so I said I'd get my lumpiest jewels out of the safe and put a maid and hairdresser to work on me so I'd be a credit to 'em at dinner and then we'd spend a jolly evening at some show. Jeff said he'd also doll up in his dress suit and get shaved and manicured and everything, so he'd look like one in my own walk of life. Ben was already dressed for evening. He had on a totally new suit of large black and white checks looking like a hotel floor from a little distance, bound with braid of a quiet brown, and with a vest of wide stripes in green and mustard colour. It was a suit that the automobile law in some states would have compelled him to put dimmers on; it made him look egregious, if that's the word; but I knew it was no good appealing to his better nature. He said he'd have dinner ordered for us in another palm grill that had more palms in it.
Jake Berger spoke up for the first time to any one but a waiter. He asked why a palm room necessarily? He said the tropic influence of these palms must affect the waiters that had to stand under 'em all day, because they wouldn't take his orders fast enough. He said the languorous Southern atmosphere give 'em pellagra or something. Jeff Tuttle says Jake must be mistaken because the pellagra is a kind of a Spanish dance, he believes. Jake said maybe so; maybe it was tropic neurasthenia the waiters got. Ben said he'd sure look out for a fresh waiter that hadn't been infected yet. When I left 'em Jake was holding a split-second watch on the waiter he'd just given an order to.
By seven P.M. I'd been made into a work of art by the hotel help and might of been observed progressing through the palatial lobby with my purple and gold opera cloak sort of falling away from the shoulders. Jeff Tuttle observed me for one. He was in his dress suit all right, standing over in a corner having a bell-hop tie his tie for him that he never can learn to do himself. That's the way with Jeff; he simply wasn't born for the higher hotel life. In his dress suit he looks exactly like this here society burglar you're always seeing a picture of in the papers. However, I let him trail me along into this jewelled palm room with tapestries and onyx pillars and prices for food like the town had been three years beleagured by an invading army. Jake Berger is alone at our table sipping a stinger and looking embarrassed because he'll have to say something. He gets it over as soon as he can. He says Ben has ordered dinner and stepped out and that Lon has stepped out to look for him but they'll both be back in a minute, so set down and order one before this new waiter is overcome by the tropic miasma. We do the same, and in comes Lon looking very excited in the dress suit he was married in back about 1884.
"Ben's found one," he squeals excitedly—"a real genuine one that was born right here in New York and is still living in the same house he was born in. What do you know about that? Ben is frantic with delight and is going to bring him to dine with us as soon as he gets him brushed off down in the wash room and maybe a drink or two thrown into him to revive him from the shock of Ben running across him. Ain't it good, though! Poor old Ben, looking for a born one and thinking he'd never find him and now he has!"
We all said how glad we was for Ben's sake and Lon called over a titled aristocrat of foreign birth and ordered him to lay another place at the table. Then he tells us how the encounter happened. Ben had stepped out on Broadway to buy an evening paper and coming back he was sneaking a look at his new suit in a plate-glass window, walking blindly ahead at the same time. That's the difference between the sexes in front of a plate-glass window. A woman is entirely honest and shameless; she'll stop dead and look herself over and touch up anything that needs it as cool as if she was the last human on earth; while man, the coward, walks by slow and takes a long sly look at himself, turning his head more and more till he gets swore at by some one he's tramped on. This is how Ben had run across the only genuine New Yorker that seemed to be left. He'd run across his left instep and then bore him to the ground like one of these juggernuts or whatever they are. Still, at that, it seemed kind of a romantic meeting, like mebbe the hand of fate was in it. We chatted along, waiting for the happy pair, and Jake ordered again to be on the safe side because the waiter would be sure to contract hookworm or sleeping sickness in this tropic jungle before the evening was over. Jeff Tuttle said this was called the Louis Château room and he liked it. He also said, looking over the people that come in, that he bet every dress suit in town was hired to-night. Then in a minute or two more, after Jake Berger sent a bill over to the orchestra leader with a card asking him to play all quick tunes so the waiters could fight better against jungle fever, in comes Ben Sutton driving his captive New Yorker before him and looking as flushed and proud as if he'd discovered a strange new vest pattern.
The captive wasn't so much to look at. He was kind of neat, dressed in one of the nobby suits that look like ninety dollars in the picture and cost eighteen; he had one of these smooth ironed faces that made him look thirty or forty years old, like all New York men, and he had the conventional glue on his hair. He was limping noticeably where Ben had run across him, and I could see he was highly suspicious of the whole gang of us, including the man who had treated him like he was a cockroach. But Ben had been persuasive and imperious—took him off his feet, like you might say—so he shook hands all around and ventured to set down with us. He had the same cold, slippery cautious hand that every New York man gives you the first time so I says to myself he's a real one all right and we fell to the new round of stingers Jake had motioned for, and to the nouveaux art-work food that now came along.
Naturally Ben and the New Yorker done most of the talking at first; about how the good old town had changed; how they was just putting up the Cable Building at Houston Street when Ben left in '92, and wasn't the old Everett House a good place for lunch, and did the other one remember Barnum's Museum at Broadway and Ann, and Niblo's Garden was still there when Ben was, and a lot of fascinating memories like that. The New Yorker didn't relax much at first and got distinctly nervous when he saw the costly food and heard Ben order vintage champagne which he always picks out by the price on the wine list. I could see him plain as day wondering just what kind of crooks we could be, what our game was and how soon we'd spring it on him—or would we mebbe stick him for the dinner check? He didn't have a bit good time at first, so us four others kind of left Ben to fawn upon him and enjoyed ourselves in our own way.
It was all quite elevating or vicious, what with the orchestra and the singers and the dancing and the waiters with vitality still unimpaired. And New York has improved a lot, I'll say that. The time I was there before they wouldn't let a lady smoke except in the very lowest table d'hotes of the underworld at sixty cents with wine. And now the only one in the whole room that didn't light a cigarette from time to time was a nervous dame in a high-necked black silk and a hat that was never made farther east than Altoona, that looked like she might be taking notes for a club paper on the attractions or iniquities of a great metropolis. Jeff Tuttle was fascinated by the dancing; he called it the "tangle" and some of it did look like that. And he claimed to be shocked by the flagrant way women opened up little silver boxes and applied the paints, oils, and putty in full view of the audience. He said he'd just as lief see a woman take out a manicure set and do her nails in public, and I assured him he probably would see it if he come down again next year, the way things was going—him talking that way that had had his white tie done in the open lobby; but men are such. Jake Berger just looked around kindly and didn't open his head till near the end of the meal. I thought he wasn't noticing anything at all till the orchestra put on a shadow number with dim purple lights.