But come; this is still Broadway. A block off they know nothing of all this. Above us Daly's is closing and its fashionable audience pouring out on the pavement. In Twenty-ninth Street, the Cairo, the Alhambra, the Bohemia, are just as brilliant and fascinating as usual.
I remember, one evening, as I was passing the ladies' entrance to the Gilsey House, on my way home from the club, out comes a visiting family party--_monsieur et madame et sa fille_. Monsieur stops, buttoning up that "good frock coat," the uniform of the American senator, which has proclaimed Squedunk through every capital in Europe. He stands, the oracle of the post office, the rich man of the county, the benignant elder of the Congregational church, gazing across the way at all the flaring signs toward Sixth Avenue.
"Ah," says he, smiling reminiscently, "the Midway. Let's go and look at 'em, my dears."
I had a wicked impulse to go, too, and see what happened. But I repressed it, and took the liberty to inform Mr. Smallville that those places were not especially recommended for ladies. I think miss was mortally offended with me for upsetting the program.
Are other people secretly disappointed, too, because they can't get a peep behind those closed doors? It was Madam Eve, I believe, who first tasted the apple; it was Pandora who lifted the lid of the box of troubles; propose a slumming party, and be sure it is the ladies who will applaud loudest. Well, then--those places, dear Miss Smallville are--very much like the zenanas the foreign missionaryess told you about last autumn in the church parlors. Now you know all about it. Ask your brother Tom if I'm not correct. I wager he can tell you if he chooses.
It is a curious fact, by the way, that all the places which make Broadway notorious are in the side streets. Just as it is a curious misnomer to call the toughest section of it the Tenderloin. Broadway has no slums. Laboring people, even, never make any distinguishable element in its populace. This is, of course, owing to its geographical position. But there is one fact which is immensely to its credit, and is perhaps due to the Irish who govern it, if they do prefer Fifth Avenue to parade in. For when Brian Boru--from whom every loyal Irishman is descended--was king, didn't a beauteous damsel, with a ring of price, stroll unprotected and in safety over his kingdom? Beauteous damsels with rings of price certainly stroll unprotected over Broadway, but this is not the fact I emphasize. It is, seriously, that it is quite possible for young ladies to walk this fastest mile in the United States, with their papas and mammas, every evening, and write home to Kate that "it is just like Saturday night on Main Street, only bigger." No sensible girl could promenade the Strand or the Bois after theater hours, no matter how chaperoned, and then make such a comparison. Huzza! I say. Huzza! It is America's compliment to her women.
