Page:Lynch Williams--The stolen story and other newspaper stories.djvu/91

 crooked, narrow, village-like streets running all sorts of directions and crossing each other where they had no right to; where the shops and people and the whole atmosphere still seemed removed and village-like. He had a lot of fun looking out for old houses with lovable doorways and fanlights and knockers, and sometimes good white Greek columns. And then, up along East Broadway, which was once so fashionable and is now so for lorn, with dirty cloakmakers in the spacious drawing-rooms and signs in Hebrew characters in the windows. He used to gaze at them as he walked by and dream about the old days of early century hospitality there; the queer clothes the women wore and the strong punch the men drank, and the stilted conversation they both liked, instead of planning how to work up his story, and then with a shock would discover that he had passed the house where he was to push in and ask a woman if it was true that her husband had run away with another man's wife; and the worst of it was that they generally talked about it.

Not that all his assignments were dis-