The gay habitats of the very rich and the very poor, the very dashing
and the very criminal, not to mention the lately exploited very
Bohemian, are made known to the awed high school girls of Augusta,
Georgia, and Redwing, Minnesota, not only through the bepictured and
entrancing spreads of the Sunday theatrical supplements but through the
shocked and alarmful eyes of Mr. Rupert Hughes and other chroniclers of
the mad pace of America. But the excursions of Harlem onto Broadway, the
deviltries of the dull and the revelries of the respectable are a matter
of esoteric knowledge only to the participants themselves.

A tip circulates--and in the place knowingly mentioned, gather the lower
moral-classes on Saturday and Sunday nights--the little troubled men who
are pictured in the comics as "the Consumer" or "the Public." They have
made sure that the place has three qualifications: it is cheap; it
imitates with a sort of shoddy and mechanical wistfulness the glittering
antics of the great cafes in the theatre district; and--this, above all,
important--it is a place where they can "take a nice girl," which means,
of course, that every one has become equally harmless, timid, and
uninteresting through lack of money and imagination.

There on Sunday nights gather the credulous, sentimental, underpaid,
overworked people with hyphenated occupations: book-keepers,
ticket-sellers, office-managers, salesmen, and, most of all,
clerks--clerks of the express, of the mail, of the grocery, of the
brokerage, of the bank. With them are their giggling, over-gestured,
pathetically pretentious women, who grow fat with them, bear them too
many babies, and float helpless and uncontent in a colorless sea of
drudgery and broken hopes.