But for all that I can't seem to feel that I am having a good time while I am eating it. It stimulates the same nerve centers in me that a lantern-slide lecture on "Palestine--the Old and the New," does.
However, I have noticed that there are people who are not bored by it; in fact, I have seen them deliberately order it in a restaurant when they had the choice of something else; so I thought that the only fair thing I could do would be to look into the matter and see if, in this great city, there weren't some different ways of serving roast beef to vary its monotony.
Roast beef is not the same price in all eating-places. What makes the difference? What does a diner at the Ritz get in his "roast prime ribs of beef au jus" that makes it distinctive from the "Special to-day--roast beef and mashed potatoes" of the Bowery restaurant?
To answer these questions I started out on a tour of the representative eating-places of some of our best known strata of society, and, whatever my conclusions are, you may be sure that they are thoroughly inexpert.
First, I tried out what is known as the Bay State Lunch, so called because on Thursdays they have a fishcake special. It is one of the hundreds of "self-serving" lunchrooms, where you approach the marble counter and give your order in a low tone to a man in a barber's coat, and then repeat it at intervals of one minute, each time louder and each time to a different man, until you are forced to point to a tub of salmon salad and say, "Some of that," for which your ticket is punched and you are allowed to take your portion and nurse it on the over-developed arm of a chair.
Here the roast beef shot through the Punch and Judy arrangement in the wall, a piece of meat about as large around as a man's-size mitten, steeping in its own gravy and of a pale reddish hue. The price was twenty cents, which included a dab of mashed potato dished out in an ice-cream scoop, a generous allowance of tender peas, two hot tea-biscuits and butter to match.
[Illustration: "Considering the basic ingredient, it was a perfectly satisfactory meal."]
Considering the basic ingredient, it was a perfectly satisfactory meal, and I felt that twenty cents was little enough to pay for it, especially since it was going in on my expense account.