person. His mouth gaped, he gulped, his lips quivered and made soundless efforts for a moment, and then he stammered:
“You—you find—you find—p-p-p-people there,” he said.
“People?” Again her thin eyebrows arched in fine surprise. “But of course you find people there! You find people everywhere you go…. Only,” she added, “I shouldn’t think you’d find many people anywhere at two o’clock in the morning. I should think most of them would be in bed—even on the East Side.”
“They—they stay up late over there.”
“But why?” she now cried with a good-natured but frank impatience. “That’s just what I’m trying to find out!… What’s it all about? What’s all the shooting for?” she said humorously, repeating a phrase which was in current use at that time. “—What’s the big attraction? What do they find to do that’s so interesting that it can keep them out of bed half through the night?… Really,” she cried, “if it’s so amusing as all that, I think I’ll go and have a look myself. What do they do?” she again insisted. “That’s what I want to know.”
“They—they sit around and talk.”
“But where? Where?” she now cried with frank despair. “My dear boy, that’s what I want you to tell me.”
“Oh, in—in lunch-rooms—and restaurants—and speak-easies—and—and places like that.”
“Yes,” she nodded with an air of satisfaction. “Good. At least, we have that settled. And you go to these places, too—and sit around—and watch—and listen to them. Is that it?”
“Yes,” he said helplessly, nodding, her words suddenly making all this restless and unceasing explanation of the night seem reasonless, foolish, pitifully absurd, “sometimes.”
“And what kind of people do you find in those places?” she said curiously. “I’ve often wondered what kind of people go there.”
Kind? He stared at her foolishly with gaping jaw, and gaped and muttered wordlessly, and could not find a word to say to her. Kind? Great God! what word could ever shape them, what phrase could ever utter the huge swarm and impact of just one moment, out of all those million swarming memories of kaleidoscopic night! Kind? Great God! the kind of all the earth, the kind of the whole world, the unnumbered, nameless, swarming, and illimitable kind that make all living! Kind? The mongrel compost of a hundred races—the Jews, the Irish, the Italians, and the niggers,
