"But," I complained, "I heard that there was a big elevator here, that took taxis right up stairs."
"There ain't," he said, succinctly.
Telling him to wait, we entered the door and came upon an elevator and a solitary waiter, whom we informed of our desire to see the place.
Obligingly he took us to an upper floor and opening the door of an apartment, showed us in.
"Of course," he said, "all of them are not so fine as this."
Alas for my imaginings, here was no rose-pink boudoir, no scene for a romantic meeting, but a room like one of those frightful parlor "sets" one sometimes sees in the cheapest moving pictures. However, in the movies one is spared the color of such a room; one may see that the wallpaper is of hideous design, but one cannot see its ghastly scrambled browns and greens and purples. As I glanced at the various furnishings it seemed to me that each was uglier than the last, and when finally my eye fell upon an automatic piano in a sort of combination of dark oak and art nouveau, with a stained glass front and a nickel in the slot attachment, my dream of a setting for sumptuous and esthetic sin was dead. It was a room in which adventure would taste like stale beer.
My companion placed a nickel in the slot that fed the terrible piano. There was a whirring sound, succeeded, not by low seductive strains, but by a sudden din of ragtime which crashed upon our ears as the decorations had upon our eyes.
Hastily I moved towards the door. My companion followed.
The switchboard of the Chinatown telephone exchange is set in a shrine and the operators are dressed in Chinese silks