When Ferenczy entered the café the next evening there were two different camps. One hated him because he took the Vamp home, and one admired him because he had succeeded where everybody else had failed.
When Ferenczy entered the café there were two different camps.
He went straight to Theresa's table, which was usually vacant until she came, and ordered something from the astonished waiter. They had not realized before how boisterous a mustache can be, and not one guest felt comfortable in his workaday garb facing the immaculately black and white Ferenczy.
The other guests broke precedent that evening and came to sit at the Vamp's table before she had arrived. Every time the door opened all the heads turned in its direction, still maintaining or arguing about something. And thus guests, perfect strangers, felt the weight of words hurled at them as from a cannon's mouth.
And the door was never still. The Imperial was the home of all the disappointed, disabused men of the East Side; men and women from the four corners of the earth. Former poets who studied dentistry to earn a living, and who are now completely swallowed up by their profession, came nightly, to hear themselves mock the former music composer who is now a physician, and over the ears in real estate transactions. This physician once gave to a patient a prescription as follows: "60 pounds of nails, fourteen window panes, 3×4, 12 pounds of putty and 80 pounds of lime."
Former sculptors, former painters, former dancers, former men, former women, all gather in the café of the might-have-beens, and all invite every newcomer to witness in them his own doom. Some go to concerts to hear music which they might have composed, others read poetry which they might have written, criticise a play the thought of which had lingered in their own minds for years without coming to utterance. Disabused socialists now owning factories, and great, great chemists now clerking in some drug store of the vicinity, assemble there.