"
"Oh, for your writing business," said Rivington; "you couldn't have
applied to a better shop. What I don't know about little old New York
wouldn't make a sonnet to a sunbonnet. I'll put you right in the
middle of so much local colour that you won't know whether you are a
magazine cover or in the erysipelas ward. When do you want to begin?"
Rivington is a young-man-about-town and a New Yorker by birth,
preference and incommutability.
I told him that I would be glad to accept his escort and guardianship
so that I might take notes of Manhattan's grand, gloomy and peculiar
idiosyncrasies, and that the time of so doing would be at his own
convenience.
"We'll begin this very evening," said Rivington, himself interested,
like a good fellow. "Dine with me at seven, and then I'll steer you
up against metropolitan phases so thick you'll have to have a
kinetoscope to record 'em."
So I dined with Rivington pleasantly at his club, in Forty-eleventh
street, and then we set forth in pursuit of the elusive tincture of
affairs.
As we came out of the club there stood two men on the sidewalk near
the steps in earnest conversation.
"And by what process of ratiocination," said one of them, "do you
arrive at the conclusion that the division of society into producing
and non-possessing classes predicates failure when compared with
competitive systems that are monopolizing in tendency and result
inimically to industrial evolution?"
"Oh, come off your perch!" said the other man, who wore glasses.
Pages:
224
225
226
227
228
229
230
231
232
233
234
235
236
237
238
239
240
241
242
243
244
245
246
247
248