something that was not on it: a peculiar rusk, a rusk recondite and
unheard of by my fellow-diners. The man had hopefully said that he
"would see." And here lay the rusk, magically obtained. I felicitated
him, as an equal. And then, having consumed the ice and the fruits of
the hot-house, I arose and followed in the path of the lion-breasted
woman, and arrived at an elevator, and was wafted aloft by a boy of
sixteen who did nothing else from 6 A.M. till midnight (so he said) but
ascend and descend in that elevator. By the discipline of this inspiring
and jocund task he was being prepared for manhood and the greater
world!... And yet, what would you? Elevators must have boys, and even
men. Civilization is not so simple as it may seem to the passionate
reformer and lover of humanity.

Later, in the vast lounge above the restaurant, I formed one of a group
of men, most of whom had acquired fame, and had the slight agreeable
self-consciousness that fame gives; and I listened, against a background
of the ever-insistent music, to one of those endless and multifarious
reminiscent conversations that are heard only in such places. The
companion on my right would tell how he had inhabited a house in Siam,
next to the temple in front of which the corpses of people too poor to
be burned were laid out, after surgical preliminaries, to be devoured by
vultures, and how the vultures, when gorged, would flap to the roof of
his house and sit there in contemplation. And the companion on my left
would tell how, when he was unfamous and on his beam-ends, he would stay
in bed with a sham attack of influenza, and on the day when a chance
offered itself would get up and don his only suit--a glorious one--and,
fitting an eye-glass into his eye because it made him look older, would
go forth to confront the chance. And then the talk might be interrupted
in order to consult the morning paper, and so settle a dispute about the
exact price of Union Pacifics. And then an Italian engineer would tell