His young companion returned triumphant.
“Had a little trouble with Pamela,” he
observed, as he resumed his place at the table.
“She was thinking of the opera with a girl friend
she picked up this morning. However, the idea
of news, I think, clinched it. We’ll be
at the Oriental at eight o’clock, eh?”
Fischer looked up from the fascinating patchwork below.
Already there was anticipation in his face.
“I am very glad,” he said. “There
will certainly be news.”
“Now indeed I feel that I am in New York,”
Pamela declared, as she broke off one of the blossoms
of the great cluster of deep red roses by her side,
and gazed downward over her shoulder at the far-flung
carpet of lights. “One sees little bits
of America in every country of the world, but never
this.”
Fischer, unusually grave and funereal-looking in his
dinner clothes and black tie, followed her gesture
with thoughtful eyes. Everything that was ugly
in the stretching arms of the city seemed softened,
shrouded and bejewelled. Even the sounds, the
rattle and roar of the overhead railways, the clanging
of the electric car bells, the shrieking of the sirens
upon the river, seemed somehow to have lost their harsh
note, to have become the human cry of the great live
city, awaking and stretching itself for the night.
“I agree with you,” he said. “You
dine at the Ritz-Carlton and you might be in Paris.
You dine here, and one knows that you are in America.”
“Yet even here we have become increasingly luxurious,”
Pamela remarked, looking around. “The glass
and linen upon the tables are quite French; those
shaded lights are exquisite. That little band,
too, was playing at the Ritz three years ago.
I am sure that the maitre d’hotel who brought
us to our table was once at the Cafe de Paris.”
“Money would draw all those things from Europe
even to the Sahara,” Fischer observed, “so
long as there were plenty of it. But millions
could not buy our dining table in the clouds.”
“A little effort of the imagination, fortunately,”
Pamela laughed, looking upwards. “There
are stars, but no clouds.”
“I guess one of them is going to slip down to
the next table before long,” Van Teyl observed,
with a little movement of his head.
They all three turned around and looked at the wonderful
bank of pink roses within a few feet of them.
“One of the opera women, I daresay,” the
young man continued. “They are rather fond
of this place.”
Pamela leaned forward. Fischer was watching the
streets below; Only a short distance away was a huge
newspaper building, flaring with lights. The
pavements fringing it were thronged with a little stationary
crowd. A row of motor-bicycles was in waiting.
A night edition of the paper was almost due.
“Mr. Fischer,” she asked, “what
about that news?”
