They name these brummagem cabarets after Pullman cars. The "Marathon"!
Not for them the salacious similes borrowed from the cafes of Paris!
This is where their docile patrons bring their "nice women," whose
starved fancies are only too willing to believe that the scene is
comparatively gay and joyous, and even faintly immoral. This is life!
Who cares for the morrow?

Abandoned people!

Anthony and Gloria, seated, looked about them. At the next table a party
of four were in process of being joined by a party of three, two men and
a girl, who were evidently late--and the manner of the girl was a study
in national sociology. She was meeting some new men--and she was
pretending desperately. By gesture she was pretending and by words and
by the scarcely perceptible motionings of her eyelids that she belonged
to a class a little superior to the class with which she now had to do,
that a while ago she had been, and presently would again be, in a
higher, rarer air. She was almost painfully refined--she wore a last
year's hat covered with violets no more yearningly pretentious and
palpably artificial than herself.

Fascinated, Anthony and Gloria watched the girl sit down and radiate the
impression that she was only condescendingly present. For _me_, her eyes
said, this is practically a slumming expedition, to be cloaked with
belittling laughter and semi-apologetics.

--And the other women passionately poured out the impression that though
they were in the crowd they were not of it. This was not the sort of
place to which they were accustomed; they had dropped in because it was
near by and convenient--every party in the restaurant poured out that