Page:Christopher Morley--Tales from a rolltop desk.djvu/26

 culation department of a popular magazine, and Harry performed some unexplained tasks in the office of a tea importer. Lester was fond of them both, but it seemed to him a bitter travesty that these simple-minded Philistines should possess so much higher earning power than he. So he thought of taking a garret in Greenwich Village, but in the Madison Avenue house he was sharing a big sitting room at little expense. So he spread his books about, hung up his framed letter from Przybyszewski, put his hammered brass tea caddy on the reading table, and made the best of the situation.

Even on fifteen dollars a week a young man may have a very amusing time in New York. For his room and breakfast Lester paid six dollars a week; for his other meals he used to hunt out the little table-d'hôte restaurants of which there are so many in the crosstown streets between the Avenue and Broadway. To come in from the snowy street on a winter evening, sit down to a tureen of Moretti's hot minestrone, open a new packet of ten-cent cigarettes, and prop up a copy of the Oblique Review against the cruet stand, seemed to Lester the prismatic fringe of all that was je ne sais quoi and ne plus ultra. The dandruffians in the little orchestra under the stairs would hammer out some