"
"I know the place, and your friend is quite right."
Davenport took up a soft felt hat and a plain stick with a curved handle.
When the young men emerged from the gloomy hallway to the street, which
in that part was beginning to be shabby, the street lights were already
heralding the dusk. The two hastened from the region of deteriorating
respectability to the grandiose quarter westward, and thence to Broadway
and the clang of car gongs. The human crowd was hurrying to dinner.
"What a poem a man might write about Broadway at evening!" remarked
Larcher.
Davenport replied by quoting, without much interest:
'The shadows lay along Broadway,
'Twas near the twilight tide--
And slowly there a lady fair
Was walking in her pride.'
"Poe praised those lines," he added. "But it was a different Broadway
that Willis wrote them about."
"Yes," said Larcher, "but in spite of the skyscrapers and the
incongruities, I love the old street. Don't you?"
"I used to," said Davenport, with a listlessness that silenced Larcher,
who fell into conjecture of its cause. Was it the effect of many
failures? Or had it some particular source? What part in its origin had
been played by the woman to whose fickleness the man had briefly alluded?
And, finally, had the story behind it anything to do with Edna Hill's
reasons for seeking information?
Pondering these questions, Larcher found himself at the entrance to the
chosen dining-place. It was a low, old-fashioned doorway, on a level
with the sidewalk, a little distance off Broadway.
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