"Well, I hadn't never been introduced to you, you know."
The young man laughed.
"I'll introduce myself!" said he. "My name's Max Grossman—not my real name, because I vas born in Hungary an' nobody could say my real name ofer here. My fader is a big distiller in New York—he's vorth half a million un' more: anybody'll tell you about him. 'Und he's put me on the road for him."
This and much more he told her in the following minutes. He drew a truly brilliant picture of his parental home, and, animadverting now and then with scorn on the town in which he now found himself, he painted in the highest colors the glory of Manhattan.
New York, it appeared, was a city of splendid leisure. Its entire four millions of population spent their days in rest and their nights in amusement. There were the rumbling cable-cars, the roaring elevated trains, the subway expresses, which reached out and drew the Battery within twenty minutes of the Bronx. There were the realities that had been only vague magic names to this girl: the East Side, the Bowery, the Metropolitan Opera House, the Waldorf. Nobody went to bed before three o'clock in the morning, or woke before one in the afternoon. Nobody was ugly and nobody was old. There were no books to study, no errands to run, no dishes to wash. There were only the cabs and the taxis to ride in, the hundred theaters to see, the cafés and the music, Fifth Avenue with its palaces, and Broadway, from Thirty-fourth to Forty-third "von big, yellow, happy electric lighd."
She listened. As he spoke, though she did not know it, the far-off orchestras were calling her, as if the sound of the city deafened her to all other sounds, as if the lights of New York blinded her to the lights of home.
Her own story, as she in turn briefly told it to him, provided her with the one touch of contrast needed to make the lure of the new dream complete, provided him with the one text necessary for the implications he frankly wanted her to receive. She was already so metropolitan that, when she agreed to go to the moving-picture show, she passed the portals of "The Happy Hour," as the place was optimistically entitled, with a superior scorn for all that it had to offer.
The narrow hall was dark when they entered—Max pocketing the large roll of yellow bills from which he had drawn the price of their admission—and, as they sat down, half-way toward the stage, there was being shown, on the screen, the absurd adventures of a tramp, who entered an ornate hotel grill-room and who, among wondering, well-dressed guests, was proceeding to order an elaborate meal.
"That's the Astor," whispered Max, loudly. "I'd know id anyvheres."
The pictured tramp was, of course, unable to pay his score, and, equally, of course, was pursued as he leaped through an open window.