uel Day, or, as
he was known to the cross-roads of Broadway and Forty-second street,
"Mannie" Day, provoked the most marvelous rag-time, an enlarged
photograph in crayon, of Professor Vance, in a frock coat and lawn tie,
a china bull dog, coquettishly decorated with a blue bow, and, on the
mantel piece, two tall beer steins and a hand telephone. From the long
windows one obtained a view of the iron shutters of the new department
store in Thirty-fourth Street, and of a garden, just large enough to
contain a sumach tree, a refrigerator, and the packing-case in which the
piano had arrived.

After leaving Winthrop, without waiting for Vance, Vera had returned
directly to the house in Thirty-fifth Street, and locked herself in her
room. And although "Mannie" Day had already ushered two visitors into
the front room, Vera had not yet come downstairs. In consequence, Mabel
Vance was in possession of the reception parlor.

Mrs. Vance was plump, pink-and-blonde, credulous and vulgar, but at all
times of the utmost good humor. Her admiration for Vera was equaled only
by her awe of her. On this particular afternoon, although it already was
after five o'clock, Mrs. Vance still wore a short dressing sack, open at
the throat, and heavy with somewhat soiled lace. But her blonde hair was
freshly "marcelled," and her nails pink and shining. In the absence of
Vera, she was making a surreptitious and guilty use of the telephone.
From the fact that in her left hand she held the morning telegraph open
at the "previous performances" of the horses, and that the page had been
cruelly lacerated by a hat pin, it was fair to suppose that whoever was
at the other end of the wire, was tempting her with the closing odds at
the races.

In her speculations, she was interrupted by "Mannie" Day, who entered
softy through the door from the hall.

"Mannie" Day was a youth of twenty-four. It was his heart's desire to be
a "Broadwayard." He wanted to know all of those, and to be known only by
those, who moved between the giant pillars that New York threw into the
sky to mark her progress North.

He knew the soiled White Way as the oldest inhabitant knows the single
street of the village. He knew it from the Rathskellers underground,
to the roof gardens in the sky; in his firmament the stars were the
electric advertisements over Long Acre Square, his mother earth was
asphalt, the breath of his nostrils gasolene, the telegraph was his
Bible. His grief wa