the show twice. Be the landlady's front parlor ever so permanently rented
out, the motion-picture theater has brought to thousands of young city
starvelings, if not the quietude of the home, then at least the warmth and
a juxtaposition and a deep darkness that can lave the sub-basement throb of
temples and is filled with music with a hum in it.

For two years and eight months of Saturday nights, each one of them a
semaphore dropping out across the gray road of the week, Gertie Slayback
and Jimmie Batch dined for one hour and sixty cents at the White Kitchen.
Then arm and arm up the million-candle-power flare of Broadway, content,
these two who had never seen a lake reflect a moon, or a slim fir pointing
to a star, that life could be so manifold. And always, too, on Saturday,
the tenth from the last row of the De Luxe Cinematograph, Broadway's Best,
Orchestra Chairs, fifty cents; Last Ten Rows, thirty-five. The give of
velvet-upholstered chairs, perfumed darkness, and any old love story moving
across it to the ecstatic ache of Gertie Slayback's high young heart.

On a Saturday evening that was already pointed with stars at the
six-o'clock closing of Hoffheimer's Fourteenth Street Emporium, Miss
Slayback, whose blondness under fatigue could become ashy, emerged from the
Bargain-Basement almost the first of its frantic exodus, taking the place
of her weekly appointment in the entrance of the Popular Drug Store
adjoining, her gaze, something even frantic in it, sifting the passing
crowd.

At six o'clock Fourteenth Street pours up from its basements, down from its
lofts, and out from its five-and-ten-cent stores, shows, and arcades, in
a great homeward torrent--a sweeping torrent that flows full flush to the
Subway, the Elevated, and the surface car, and then spreads thinly into the
least pretentious of the city's homes--the five flights up, the two rooms