M. passed
through Eleventh Street, between Sixth Avenue and Broadway. So
exceptionally fine was her carriage, so chaste and virginal her
presence, and so refined and even spiritual her features, that, as
a literary man, I would have been justified in taking her for the
heroine of a society novel. Indeed, I had already woven a little
romance about her, when one morning she overtook me, accompanied by
another girl--pretty, but of a different type--with whom she was
earnestly conversing. As the two passed me, there fell from her
faultless lips the following astounding sentence: "And I told him,
if he didn't like it he might lump it, and he traveled off on his
left ear, you bet!" Heaven knows what indiscretion this speech
saved me from; but the reader will understand what a sting the pain
of rejection might have added to it by the above formula.
The "morning-cocktail" men come next in my experience of early
rising. I used to take my early cup of coffee in the cafe of a
certain fashionable restaurant that had a bar attached. I could
not help noticing that, unlike the usual social libations of my
countrymen, the act of taking a morning cocktail was a solitary
one.
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