the clock are pointing to the half-hour after ten.

Hasten, then, to the downstairs cafe,--the two rooms, sunk below the
level of Fifth Avenue, yet cool and airy. If you hurry you will be
just in time to see the Village come in. For this is their really
favourite haunt--their Mecca when their pockets will stand it--the
Village Restaurant de Luxe!

Upstairs are exquisite frocks and impeccable evening clothes; good
jewels and, incidentally, a good many tired faces--from uptown. Down
here it is different. The crowd is younger, poorer, more strikingly
bizarre--immeasurably more interesting. Everyone here does something,
or thinks he does--which is just as good;--or pretends to--which is
next best. There is a startling number of girls. Girls in smocks of
"artistic" shades--bilious yellow-green, or magenta-tending violet;
girls with hair that, red, black or blonde, is usually either arranged
in a wildly natural bird's-nest mass, or boldly clubbed after the
fashion of Joan of Arc and Mrs. Vernon Castle; girls with tense little
faces, slender arms and an astonishing capacity as to cigarettes. And
men who, for the most part, are too busy with their ideals to cut
their hair; men whose collars may be low and rolling, or high and
bound with black silk stocks after the style of another day; men who
are, variously, affectedly natural or naturally affected, but who are
nearly all of them picturesque, and, in spite of their poses, quite in
earnest, after their queer fashion. They are all prophets and seers
down here; they wear their bizarre hair-cuts and unusual clothes with
a certain innocently flaunting air which rather disarms you. Their
poses are not merely poses; they are their almost childlike way of
showing the prosaic outer world how different they are!

Here they all flock--whenever they have the price. That may be a bit
beyond them sometimes, but usually there is someone in the crowd who
is "flush," and that means who will pay. For the Villagers are not
parsimonious; they stand in no danger of ever making themselves rich
and thus acquiring place in the accursed class called the Philistines!

It is beyond question that the French have a genius for hospitality.
It must be rooted in their beautiful, national tact, that gracious
impulse combining chivalry to women, friendliness to men and courtesy
to all which is so characteristic of "the world's sweetheart" France.
I have never seen a French restaurant where the most casual v