ocktail is served in a coffee cup, where wine
bottles are put on to the table with brown paper wrapped round them to
preserve the fiction that they came from one's own private (and legal)
store, where in bare, studiously Bowery chambers the hunter of a new
_frisson_ sits and dines and hopes for the worst.

The Bowery is dingy and bright; it has hawkers' barrows and chaotic
shop windows. It has the curiosity-stimulating, cosmopolite air of all
dockside areas, but to the Englishman accustomed to the picturesque
bedragglement of East End costumes, it is almost dismayingly
well-dressed. Its young men have the leanness of outline that comes
from an authentic American tailor. Its Jewesses have the neat
crispness of American fashion that gives their vivid beauty a new and
sparkling note. It was astonishing the number of beautiful young women
one saw on the Bowery, but not astonishing when one recalls the number
of beautiful young women one saw in New York. Fifth Avenue at shopping
time, for example, ceases to be a street: it becomes a pageant of youth
and grace.

The Prince, of course, may have gone into the Bowery, and walked
therein with the air of a modern Caliph, but I myself have not heard of
it. I was told that he went for a walk to the house of a friend, and
that after paying a very pleasant and ordinary visit he returned to the
_Renown_ to get what sleep he could before the adventure of another New
York day.

IV

The morning of Wednesday, November 19th, was devoted by the Prince to
high finance; he went down to Wall Street and to visit the other
temples of the gold god.

When one has become acclimated to the soaring upward rush of the
skyscrapers (and one quite soon loses consciousness of them, for where
all buildings are huge each building becomes commonplace), when one
stops looking upward, "Down Town" New York is strangely like the "City"
area of London. Walking Broadway one might easily imagine oneself in
the neighbourhood of the Bank of England; Wall Street might easily be a
turning out of Bishopsgate or Cannon Street. Broad Street, New York,
is not so very far removed in appearance from Broad Street, London.

There is the same preoccupied congestion of the same work-mazed people:
clerks, typists (stenographers), book-keepers, messengers and masters,
though, perhaps, the people of the New York business quarter do not
wear the air of sadness those of London wear.

And there is the same massive so