Mary Regan

It was opening night of the new bill at the Grand Alcazar; and Clifford, as he waited alone at a little table for his host, almost unconsciously searched through the great restaurant of black-and-gold for Mary Regan--just as, almost unconsciously, he had been seeking her wherever he had been during the six months of agreed-upon silence since they had parted. He did not expect to see her here, hence felt no disappointment when his roving eyes did not come upon her. She had said she would write when she had thought it all out, and when she was ready to see him. Six months was a long time, but he believed in her word--and still waited, not once having sought to penetrate that utter privacy which she had asserted to be for her, at that time, life’s prime essential. But though keeping his word, he had often been impatient, and had often wondered.

Meditatively Clifford glanced over this great crowd of well-dressed diners. For him they were a vivid concentration, a cross-section, of life: of life as he, in his philosophy, and in the pursuit of his profession, had come to see it. Here were millionaires, many of them having made their easeful fortunes by dubious operations which shrewd counsel had steered just within the law; here were young men of moderate means, spending recklessly; here were society women of the younger and smarter set, with their escorts, sowing the seeds, though they dreamed it not, of possible scandal and possible blackmail; here were members of that breed of humans who are known as “sporting men”; here were the most finished types of professional crooks, many accompanied by the finished women of their own kind, but here and there with them a girl who had no idea of the manner of man with whom she ate and drank, and no idea of the end of this her pleasant adventure; and here were respectable mothers and their daughters, who were innocent of what sat at the next table; and here were out-of-town visitors who were visibly excited and exalted by the thought that they were seeing life--New York!--the real New York!

Clifford smiled sadly, rather grimly, to himself. These conglomerate guests were proof of what he had long held: that there was no distinct underworld, no distinct upperworld; that in ideas and personalities the two were always merging. This scene summarized what experience had made the basic idea of Clifford’s working philosophy: the great interrelation, the great interdependence, the great oneness of all humanity.

Looking over this mixture of all sorts, in which acquaintance was so easy to make, Clifford thought of the strange dramas that had their beginnings in the Grand Alcazar and establishments of its kind. Thus much had the dancing craze, though now receded from its earliest frenzy, and the practice of dining and eating midnight suppers in the showy restaurants, achieved: it had brought all sorts of persons, so long as they were well dressed, under the same roof and had set them down at the same or adjoining tables. Hardly since time began had that important requisite of great drama been so nearly perfect as in these restaurants--for people of different ideas and interests and moral standards to meet naturally upon a common ground....