ople were dropping in and taking seats at the tables. They were all of
one class. Young men who lived in hall bedrooms. Young women who worked
in shops or offices, a couple here and there, who, living far uptown,
had come to Shandy's to dinner, that they might go to cheap seats in
some theatre afterwards. In the latter case, the girls wore their best
hats, had bright eyes, and cheeks lightly flushed by their sense of
festivity. Two or three were very pretty in their thin summer dresses
and flowered or feathered head gear, tilted at picturesque angles over
their thick hair. When each one entered the eyes of the young men at the
corner table followed her with curiosity and interest, but the glances
at her escort were always of a disparaging nature.

"There's a beaut!" said Nick Baumgarten. "Get onto that pink stuff
on her hat, will you. She done it because it's just the colour of her
cheeks."

They all looked, and the girl was aware of it, and began to laugh and
talk coquettishly to the young man who was her companion.

"I wonder where she got Clarence?" said Jem Belter in sarcastic allusion
to her escort. "The things those lookers have fastened on to them gets
ME."

"If it was one of US, now," said Bert Johnson. Upon which they broke
into simultaneous good-natured laughter.

"It's queer, isn't it," young Baumgarten put in, "how a fellow always
feels sore when he sees another fellow with a peach like that? It's just
straight human nature, I guess."

The door swung open to admit a newcomer, at the sight of whom Jem Belter
exclaimed joyously: "Good old Georgie! Here he is, fellows! Get on to
his glad rags."

"Glad rags" is supposed to buoyantly describe such attire as, by its
freshness or elegance of style, is rendered a suitable adornment for
festive occasions or loftier leisure moments. "Glad rags" may mean
evening dress, when a young gentleman's wardrobe can aspire to splendour
so marked, but it also applies to one's best and latest-purchased garb,
in contradistinction to the less ornamental habiliments worn every day,
and designated as "office clothes."

G. Selden's economies had not enabled him to give himself into the hands
of a Bond Street tailor, but a careful study of cut and material, as
spread before the eye in elegant coloured illustrations in the windows
of respectable shops in less ambitious quarters, had resulted in the
purchase of a well-made suit of smart English cut. He had a nice young
figure, a