Once she had been on the stage, but she got a rough deal and quit
A GIRL OF THE NIGHT
The band on the platform at the end of the big hall was booming out the popular melodies of the day for dear life and the piercing notes produced by the leather-lunged piccolo player were heard as far as the street.
“That guy up there has me deaf with that flute he’s blowing,” remarked Big Lizzie, “and while I don’t wish him any harm yet I hope he chokes.”
“That knocks this place,” remarked her pal. “Why, I had a John in here the other day and he was wanting to buy me a new dress, and I thought he was wanting to know where I lived, and I was writing my name and number down on a piece of paper and he got disgusted and went away. It drives ’em out, if you want to know what I think.”
But it was once a famous old place when Fourteenth street was really good, and the casual visitor to New York who didn’t drop in for an hour or so missed something.
It was one of the sights, and the great mechanical organ invented and built by a straight-laced Methodist is there still, although he has long ago ceased calling the attention of his friends to the fact. Its tunes to-day are sandwiched in with those of the band, and in the interval the trombone player gets a chance to recover his breath.
Morning, noon and night men and women wander in, sit at the little round tables, drink queer decoctions made of liquor strong enough to eat into Harveyized steel, and then go forth to tear up the town. The police pass it by as though it were nothing more serious than an ice cream parlor or a peanut emporium, while the tide of upholstered and hand-painted mademoiselles sweep in on the flood and drift out on the ebb with business written in every line of their faces.
Their paths radiate like the sticks of a fan from this rendezvous of the social evil, and in their movements they show nearly all the characteristics of the honey-gathering bee.
The engaging and winsome smile of a girl not yet out of her teens had caught the eye of the man in this story, and against his will he had allowed her to lead him into this place where mirth was nothing more nor less than a mask behind which a skeleton face grinned, and where neither laughter nor anything else was sincere. Her black eyes had not yet taken on that hardness which the years to come would surely add to them, and her ways were to a certain extent ingenuous. Besides, she was distinctly pretty with her Yiddish style of beauty, which was unfortunately of the kind which matures at sixteen and is old at twenty-five. Either teaching or a subtle instinct had caused her to discard the gorgeous plumes and brilliant colors which had marked her debut on the street less than a year before, and in consequence she might have passed for anything but what she was.