ery existence. It ends with a brand-new hotel, all red brick, and white
tiling, and Louise Quinze furniture, and sour-cream colored marble lobby,
and oriental rugs lavishly scattered under the feet of the unappreciative
guest from Kansas City. It is a street of signs, is South Clark. They
vary all the way from "Banca Italiana" done in fat, fly-specked letters
of gold, to "Sang Yuen" scrawled in Chinese red and black. Spaghetti and
chop suey and dairy lunches nestle side by side. Here an electric sign
blazons forth the tempting announcement of lunch. Just across the way,
delicately suggesting a means of availing one's self of the invitation,
is another which announces "Loans." South Clark Street can transform a
winter overcoat into hamburger and onions so quickly that the eye can't
follow the hand.

Do you gather from this that you are being taken slumming? Not at all.
For the passer-by on Clark Street varies as to color, nationality,
raiment, finger-nails, and hair-cut according to the locality in which
you find him.

At the tenement end the feminine passer-by is apt to be shawled, swarthy,
down-at-the-heel, and dragging a dark-eyed, fretting baby in her wake.
At the hotel end you will find her blonde of hair, velvet of boot, plumed
of head-gear, and prone to have at her heels a white, woolly, pink-eyed
dog.

The masculine Clark Streeter? I throw up my hands. Pray remember that
South Clark Street embraces the dime lodging house, pawnshop, hotel,
theater, chop-suey and railway office district, all within a few blocks.
From the sidewalk in front of his groggery, "Bath House John" can see the
City Hall. The trim, khaki-garbed enlistment officer rubs elbows with
the lodging house bum. The masculine Clark Streeter may be of the kind
that begs a dime for a bed, or he may loll in manicured luxury at the
marble-lined hotel. South Clark Street is so splendidly indifferent.

Copy-hunting, I approached Tony with hope in my heart, a smile on my
lips, and a nickel in my hand.

"Philadelphia--er--Inquirer?" I asked, those being the city and paper
which fire my imagination least.

Tony whipped it out, dexterously.

I looked at his keen blue eye, his lean brown face, and his punishing
jaw, and I knew that no airy persiflage would deceive him. Boldly I
waded in.

"I write for the magazines," said I.

"Do they know it?" grinned Tony.

"Just beginning to be faintly aware. Your stand looks like a story to
me.