Broadway is darker. The theater lights are out. Only bars and apothecaries, shops and hotels, are brilliant. The opera is over, and carriages are whirling away toward Fifth Avenue, and tramcars crawling along in procession, packed to the platforms with gayly dressed passengers. Across the way from Macy's huge dark store, the _Herald_ presses are rushing off the biography of the day in sight of everybody, and no philosopher moralizes on that awful, tremendous record of four-and-twenty hours of a whole world's work, play, crime, suffering, heroism, love, faith.
Our fast friends must tremble as they pass those windows, and remember the relentless, watchful eyes forever fixed on them. The ladies and gentlemen of this society dine at Shanley's and Rector's, and call supper _lunch_. Except that they are more painstakingly dressed, they don't look very different from others. I have often thought that such a congregation might gather in Trinity Chapel, say, and be preached to by an innocent clergyman with a weary sense of the futility of trying to make such evidently virtuous persons penitent.
Should you like to really know them? They are thick about you on every hand. Drama and tragedy and pathos are in rehearsal now; and that old comedy of "A Fool and His Money." Walk a few blocks with the night clerk of Wilson's chemist shop. Get to know the bookmaker coming out of George Considine's Metropole bar, chat with our acquaintance, the plainclothes man. Join that man-about-town, on his way to the Astoria Club. Masks will be torn off then, every actor will be seen as he is. That family coachman is a burglar just out of Auburn. That thin, alert gentleman in evening clothes is a gambler, getting a breath of air before taking his place behind Daly's wheel. That pale-faced student is a reporter on his way to "hit the pipe." That sweet-faced girl will be screaming drunk by two o'clock--the pale little man in mourning is the most notorious divekeeper in America. The one with the beautiful silver beard is a race-track owner over in New Jersey, and they call the red-headed Jew talking to "Honest John Kelly" the king of the gold-brick men. This well-dressed gentleman with the large hands is Corbett, the pugilist; that kindly-faced, handsome one, going into Tom O'Rourke's, is a famous all-round sport. Notice that beautifully gowned, superbly handsome brunette who is getting out of a hansom at Martin's Restaurant. She had a yataghan in her flat she brought from Paris with her, and she caught it up one night and drove it into her lover's neck, and was acquitted on the ground that it was done in self-defense.