of Village tea rooms. The chief points in the Gondolier's "quaintness" seem
to be that it is chopped up into as many little partitions as a roulette
wheel and that all food has to be carried up from a cellar that imparts
even to orange marmalade a faint persuasive odor of somebody else's wash.
Still, during the last eight months, the Gondolier has been a radical
bookstore devoted to bloody red pamphlets, a batik shop full of strange
limp garments ornamented with decorative squiggles, and a Roumanian
Restaurant called "The Brodska" whose menu seemed to consist almost
entirely of old fish and maraschino cherries.

The wispy little woman from Des Moines who conducts the Gondolier at
present in a series of timid continual flutters at actually leading the
life of the Bohemian untamed, and who gives all the young hungry-looking
men extra slices of toast because any one of them might be Vachel Lindsay
in disguise, will fail in another six weeks and then the Gondolier may turn
into anything from a Free Verse Tavern to a Meeting Hall for the Friends of
Slovak Freedom. But at present, the tea is much too good for the price in
spite of its inescapable laundry tang, and there is a flat green bowl full
of Japanese iris bulbs in the window--the second of which pleases Mrs.
Severance and the first Ted.

Besides like most establishments on the verge of bankruptcy, it is such
a quiet place to talk--the only other two people in it are a boy with
startled hair and an orange smock and a cigaretty girl called Tommy, and
she is far too busy telling him that that dream about wearing a necklace
of flying-fish shows a dangerous inferiority complex even to comment
caustically on strangers from uptown who _will_ intrude on the dear
Village.

"Funny stuff--dreams," says Ted uneasily, catching at overheard phrases for