Aurelia smiled.
“Very well,” said I, “I must go elsewhere and find out.”
I went into a palace, tile-floored, cherub-ceilinged and square with the cop. I put my foot on the brass rail and said to Billy Magnus, the best bartender in the diocese:
“Billy, you’ve lived in New York a long time—what kind of a song-and-dance does this old town give you? What I mean is, doesn’t the gab of it seem to kind of bunch up and slide over the bar to you in a sort of amalgamated tip that hits off the burg in a kind of an epigram with a dash of bitters and a slice of———”
“Excuse me a minute,” said Billy, “somebody’s punching the button at the side door.”
He went away; came back with an empty tin bucket; again vanished with it full; returned and said to me:
“That was Mame. She rings twice. She likes a glass of beer for supper. Her and the kid. If you ever saw that little skeesicks of mine brace up in his high chair and take his beer and——— But, say, what was yours? I get kind of excited when I hear them two rings—was it the baseball score or a gin fizz you asked for?”
“Ginger ale,” I answered.
I walked up to Broadway. I saw a cop on the cor-
[6]
