IX
“Childs’, 59th Street,” at eight o’clock of any morning differs from its sisters by less than the width of their marble tables or the degree of polish on the frying-pans. You will see there a crowd of poor people with sleep in the corners of their eyes, trying to look straight before them at their food so as not to see the other poor people. But Childs’, 59th, four hours earlier is quite unlike any Childs’ restaurant from Portland, Oregon, to Portland, Maine. Within its pale but sanitary walls one finds a noisy medley of chorus girls, college boys, debutantes, rakes, filles de joie —a not unrepresentative mixture of the gayest of Broadway, and even of Fifth Avenue.
In the early morning of May the second it was unusually full. Over the marble-topped tables were bent the excited faces o
