name Gonfarone's was thinly disguised. Mr. Lute wrote a quatrain once
every three months for the "Mauve Monthly," and Miss Nuncheon, tall and
thin, with a mop of orange-coloured hair, contributed somewhere stories
about the "smart set," "a society existing far off amid the glamour of
opera-boxes, conservatories full of orchids, yachts like ocean
steamships, mansions with marble stairways, Paris dresses by the gross,
and hatfuls of diamonds, where the women were always discovered in
boudoirs with a French maid named Fanchette in attendance, receiving
bunches of long-stemmed roses from potential correspondents, while the
men, all very tall and dark, possessed of interesting pasts, were
introduced before fireplaces in sumptuous bachelor apartments, the veins
knotted on their temples, and their strong yet aristocratic fingers
clutching a photograph or a scented note."

Gonfarone's, the "Benedetto's" of the tale, is an old, converted
dwelling house. There are the brown-stone steps, flanked by a pair of
iron lanterns, giving entrance to a narrow corridor; and, beyond, to the
right, the dining room, extending through the house, linoleum underfoot,
hat-racks and buffets of oak aligned against the brownish walls, and,
everywhere, little tables, each covered with a scanty cloth, set close
together. In the days when Felix Piers was in the habit of patronizing
the place there floated to his ears such phrases as "bad colour scheme!"
"sophomoric treatment!" "miserable drawing!" "no atmosphere!" But all
that was years ago. When the writer dined there last, a month or so
back, fragments of conversation caught from the clatter of the tongues
of the Bohemians were: "Take it from me, kid!" "If old man Weinstein
thinks he can put that over, he's got another guess coming!" "And then I
give her the juice and we lost that super-six in the dust!" "Yes,
Huggins has got _some_ infield!"

Fifteen or twenty years ago the trail of Bohemia would have inevitably
led to Maria's in West Twelfth Street. For there to be found, among
others, was a certain Mickey Finn, as celebrated in his day and town as
Aristide Bruant was in a section of Paris of the nineties. About Finn
gathered a group of newspaper men and journalists. The distinction was
that the newspaper man was one who earned his daily bread on Park Row,
while the journalist had written a sketch for the New York "Sun" in
1878, and still carried and proudly exhibited the clipping. The original
M