How dull the others were, sitting at the table disputing the quality of the food. How was she ever so blind and stupid as not to see!
Marco now got up from the table, put both his hands on the musician's shoulders, and sang on—and as he sang he grew bigger and bigger.
The place went wild when he finished. Moskowitz kissed him, and Fay could plainly see that at least fifty pairs of lips longed to do likewise.
"Marco, Marco, why have you never brought me here before?" cried Fay in joy, as she kissed the happy man.
And now, nightly at Moskowitz's, a bushy Roumanian is drinking his bottle in company of a pretty American girl, who dreams of the day when she will see the country from which such songs, and such men, come.
EXPENSIVE POVERTY
It is no longer permitted to be poor; still less to appear poor. It is not yet a legal crime but a social one. It is comparatively easy to evade punishment for legal crimes, but punishment for a social crime is as swift as it is merciless. No defense is possible because the prosecutor and judge is invisible. There is no defense and no appeal. No higher court to reverse judgment on technical or constitutional grounds. Accusation alone is equivalent to condemnation.
"There was a time when the poor of the land were an institution, as respectable as they were part of the scheme which recognized them. The poor did not have to dress like the rich, did not have to live like the rich, act like the rich, and be buried like the rich.
"But those times are gone. A fifteen dollar a week clerk is supposed to dress in clothes as expensive as his superior who receives four times the amount. He is not considered "ambitious" if he does not starve himself to appear spick and span every day of the week. Sinkers and coffee for lunch after a breakfast-less breakfast, to buy a neat silk necktie. No lunch at all to have a suit pressed. Dinnerless dinners to buy new shoes or a new hat. The shoemakers have forgotten how to put patches on shoes. The mothers have forgotten how to patch up a worn-out seat or a threaded elbow. It is no longer done."