running across him. Ain't it good, though!
Poor old Ben, looking for a born one and thinking he'd never find him
and now he has!"

We all said how glad we was for Ben's sake and Lon called over a titled
aristocrat of foreign birth and ordered him to lay another place at the
table. Then he tells us how the encounter happened. Ben had stepped out
on Broadway to buy an evening paper and coming back he was sneaking a
look at his new suit in a plate-glass window, walking blindly ahead at
the same time. That's the difference between the sexes in front of a
plate-glass window. A woman is entirely honest and shameless; she'll
stop dead and look herself over and touch up anything that needs it as
cool as if she was the last human on earth; while man, the coward, walks
by slow and takes a long sly look at himself, turning his head more and
more till he gets swore at by some one he's tramped on. This is how Ben
had run across the only genuine New Yorker that seemed to be left. He'd
run across his left instep and then bore him to the ground like one of
these juggernuts or whatever they are. Still, at that, it seemed kind of
a romantic meeting, like mebbe the hand of fate was in it. We chatted
along, waiting for the happy pair, and Jake ordered again to be on the
safe side because the waiter would be sure to contract hookworm or
sleeping sickness in this tropic jungle before the evening was over.
Jeff Tuttle said this was called the Louis Chateau room and he liked it.
He also said, looking over the people that come in, that he bet every
dress suit in town was hired to-night. Then in a minute or two more,
after Jake Berger sent a bill over to the orchestra leader with a card
asking him to play all quick tunes so the waiters could fight better
against jungle fever, in comes Ben Sutton driving his captive New Yorker
before him and looking as flushed and proud as if he'd discovered a
strange new vest pattern.

The captive wasn't so much to look at. He was kind of neat, dressed in
one of the nobby suits that look like ninety dollars in the picture and
cost eighteen; he had one of these smooth ironed faces that made him
look thirty or forty years old, like all New York men, and he had the
conventional glue on his hair. He was limping noticeably where Ben had
run across him, and I could see he was highly suspicious of the whole
gang of us, including the man who had treated him like he was a
cockroach. But Ben had been persuasive and imper