ears of work. Immediately they set about making a
real fiesta of the unusual occasion. Miss Bailey, a small, round,
efficient person with nice eyes and good manners, moved about among
her guests, all of whom she seemed to know. The best cheese sandwiches
in New York went round. A girl in a vampire costume of grey--hooded
and with long trailing sleeves--got up from her solitary place in the
corner. She seemed to be wearing, beneath the theatrical garment, a
kimono and bedroom slippers. Obviously she had simply drifted in for
sandwiches before going to bed. She vanished down the ladder.

An hour later, we, too, climbed down the ladderish stairs, my
companion and I, and as we came out into the fresh quiet of Fourth
Street at midnight, I had a really odd sensation. I felt as though I
had been reading a fascinating and unusual book, and had--suddenly
closed it for the night.

This was one of the first of the real Village eating places which I
ever knew. Perhaps that is why it comes first to my memory as I write.
I do not know that it is more representative or more interesting than
others. But it was worth going back to.

Yet, after all, it isn't the food and drink, nor yet the unusual
surroundings, that bring you back to these places. It's the--well, one
has to use, once in a while, the hard-worked and generally
inappropriate word "atmosphere." Like "temperament" and
"individuality" and the rest of the writer-folk's old reliables,
"atmosphere" is too often only a makeshift, a lazy way of expressing
something you won't take the trouble to define more expressively. Dick
says in "The Light That Failed" that an old device for an unskilful
artist is to stick a superfluous bunch of flowers somewhere in a
picture where it will cover up bad drawing. I'm afraid writers are apt
to use stock phrases in the same meretricious fashion.

But this is a fact just the same. Nearly all the Greenwich Village
places really have atmosphere. You can be cynical about it, or frown
at it, or do anything you like about it, but it's there, and it's the
real thing. It's an absolute essence and ether which you feel
intensely and breathe necessarily, but which no one can put quite
definitely into the concrete form of words. I have heard of liquid or
solidified air, but that's a scientific experiment, and who wants to
try scientific experiments on the Village which we all love?

"But such an amount of play-acting and pose!" I hear someone complain,
r