mbuscade of
lights which flamed about them. Marsh, who could never brook waiting,
without having altered his pace made a wide detour amid a jam of
automobiles, dodged two surface cars and a file of trucks, and arrived
at the opposite curb considerably after Crocker, who had waited for the
direct route. Neither perceived how characteristic of their divergent
temperaments this incident had been. But Marsh, whose spirit was
irreverence, exclaimed contemptuously:

"The Great White Way. What a sham!" He extended his arm with an
extravagant gesture, as much as to say, "I could change all that," and
continued: "Look at it. There are not ten buildings on it that will last
five years. Take away the electric advertisements and you'll see it as
it is--a main street in a mining town. All the rest is shanty
civilization, that will come tumbling down like a pack of cards. Look at
it; a few hidden theaters with an entrance squeezed between a
cigar-store and a haberdashery, restaurants on one floor, and the rest
advertisements."

"Still it gives you quite a feeling," said Bojo in dissent, caught in
the surging currents of automobiles and the mingled throngs of late
workers and early pleasure-seekers. "There's an exhilaration about it
all. It does wake you up."

"Think of a city of five thousand millionaires that can build a hundred
business cathedrals a year, that has an opera house with the front of a
warehouse and calls a row of squatty booths luxury. Well, never mind;
here we are. Rub your eyes."

They had left the roar and brilliancy of the curiously blended mass
behind, plunging down a squalid side street with tenements in the dark
distances, when Marsh came to a stop before two green pillars, above
which a swaying sign announced--

WESTOVER COURT
BACHELOR APARTMENTS

Before Bojo could recover from his astonishment, he found himself
conducted through a long, irregular monastic hall flooded with mellow
lights and sudden arches, and as bewilderingly introduced, in a sort of
Arabian Nights adventure, into an oasis of quiet and green things. They
were in an inner court shut in from the outer world by the rise of a
towering wall at one end and at the other by the blazing glass back of a
great restaurant. In the heart of the noisiest, vilest, most brutal
struggle of the city lay this little bit of the Old World, decked in
green plots, with vine-covered fountain and a stone Cupid perched on
tip-toe, and above a group of drea