e second floor, reached, if I remember rightly,
by means of an entrance on the Twenty-third Street side, was dreary
enough; but turn to the pages of the romance of the sixties and
seventies and eighties, and on the heavily upholstered sofas enamoured
couples sat in furtive meeting, and words of endearment were whispered,
and all the stock intrigue of fiction was set in motion. Then, on the
ground floor, was the Amen Corner, without which no tale of political
life was complete, and the various rooms for more formal gatherings,
such as the one in which took place "The Great Secretary of State
Interview," as narrated by Jesse Lynch Williams many years ago.

But for the full flavour of the romance of this section of Fifth Avenue
it is not necessary to go back to the leisurely novelists of the
eighties and before. Recall the work of a man who, a short ten years
ago, was turning out from week to week the mirth-provoking,
amazement-provoking tales dealing with the life of what he termed his
"Little Old Bagdad on-the-Subway," his "Noisyville on-the-Hudson," his
"City of Chameleon Changes." For the Avenue as the expression of the
city's wealth and magnificence and aristocracy the late O. Henry had
little love. The glitter and pomp and pageantry were not for "the likes
of him." He preferred the more plebeian trails, the department-store
infested thoroughfare to the west, with the clattering "El" road
overhead; or Fourth Avenue to the east, beginning at the statue of
"George the Veracious," running between the silent and terrible
mountains, finally, with a shriek and a crash, to dive headlong into the
tunnel at Thirty-fourth Street, and never to be seen again; or even
some purlieu of the great East Side, where he could sit listening at
ease in the humble shop of Fitbad the Tailor.

There was, however, one portion of land belonging to the Avenue where he
felt himself thoroughly at home. When, of a summer's evening, darkness
had fallen, and the leaves were fluttering in the warm breeze, and high
overhead Diana's light was twinkling, and the derelicts were gathered on
the Park benches, the world was full of delightful mystery and magic.
Close to the curb, at one corner of the Square, a low grey motor-car
with engine silent. Then whimsical fancy and a haunting memory of Robert
Louis Stevenson's "New Arabian Nights" builded up the story "While the
Auto Waits." Or perhaps the sight of a car swiftly moving with its
emergency tire danger