Half-clothed children were seeping in swelling streams from the tenements as the two—Austin holding the umbrella, Joan with a hand on her escort's arm, her skirts gathered high about her trim ankles—splashed through lukewarm puddles toward Third Avenue. A faint and odorous vapour steamed up from wet and darkly lustrous asphalt.
They hurried on in silence: Austin dumbly content with his conquest of the aloof tolerance which the girl had theretofore shown him, and planning bolder and more masterful steps; Joan all ecstatic with the prospect of seeing for the first time a "Broadway show"....
A few minutes before nine they left the cross-town car at Broadway and Forty-second Street.
Though she had lived all her young years within the boundaries of New York, never before had Joan experienced the sensation of being a unit of that roaring flood of life which nightly scours Longacre Square, with scarce a perceptible change in volume, winter or summer. Yet she accepted it with apparently implacable calm. She felt as if she had been born to this, as if she were coming tardily into her birthright—something of which each least detail would in time become most intimate to her.
They were already late, and Austin hurried her. A brief, hasty walk brought them to the theatre, where Austin left her in a corner of the lobby with the promise that he would return in a very few minutes: he had to see a friend "round back," he explained in an undertone. But Joan remained a target for boldly enquiring glances for full ten minutes before he reappeared. Even then, with a nod to her to wait, Austin went to the box-office window. She was not deceived as to the general tenor of his fortunes there—saw him place a card on the ledge and confer inaudibly with the ticket-seller, and then reluctantly remove the card and substitute for it two one-dollar bills, for which he received two slips of pasteboard.
"House 'most sold out," he muttered uncomfortably in her ear as an elevator carried them to the roof. "Best I could get was table seats."
"They're just as good as any," she whispered, with a look of gratitude that temporarily turned his head.
The elevator discharged them into a vast hall with walls and a roof of glass. Artificial wistaria festooned its beams and pillars of steel, palms and potted plants lined the walls. A myriad electric bulbs glimmered dimly throughout the auditorium, brilliantly upon the small stage. Deep banks of chairs radiated back from the footlights, to each its tenant staring greedily in one common direction.
An usher waved the newcomers to the left. Ultimately they found seats at a small table in a far corner of the enclosure.
Austin was disappointed, and made his disappointment known in a public grumble: the table was too far away; they couldn't see nothin'—might's well not've come. Joan smiled his ill-humour away, insisting that the seats were fine. Mollified, he summoned a waiter and ordered beer for himself, for Joan a glass of lemonade—a weirdly decorated and insipid concoction which, nevertheless, Joan absorbed with the keenest relish.