At Broadway, Fourteenth Street cuts quite a caper, deploying out into Union Square, an island of park, beginning to be succulent at the first false feint of spring, rising as it were from a sea of asphalt.  Across this park Miss Slayback worked her rather frenzied way, breaking into a run when the derby threatened to sink into the confusion of a hundred others, and finally learning to keep its course by the faint but distinguishing fact of a slight dent in the crown.  At Broadway, some blocks before that highway bursts into its famous flare, Mr. Batch, than whom it was no other, turned off suddenly at right angles down into a dim pocket of side-street and into the illuminated entrance of Ceiner’s Cafe Hungarian.  Meals at all hours.  Lunch, thirty cents.  Dinner, fifty cents.  Our Goulash is Famous.

New York, which expresses itself in more languages to the square block than any other area in the world, Babylon included, loves thus to dine linguistically, so to speak.  To the Crescent Turkish Restaurant for its Business Men’s Lunch comes Fourth Avenue, whose antique-shop patois reads across the page from right to left.  Sight-seeing automobiles on mission and commission bent allow Altoona, Iowa City, and Quincy, Illinois, fifteen minutes’ stop-in at Ching Ling-Foo’s Chinatown Delmonico’s.  Spaghetti and red wine have set New York racing to reserve its table d’hotes.  All except the Latin race.

Jimmie Batch, who had first seen light, and that gaslight, in a block in lower Manhattan which has since been given over to a milk-station for a highly congested district, had the palate, if not the purse, of the cosmopolite.  His digestive range included borsch and chow maigne; risotta and ham and.

To-night, as he turned into Cafe Hungarian, Miss Slayback slowed and drew back into the overshadowing protection of an adjoining office-building.  She was breathing hard, and her little face, somehow smaller from chill, was nevertheless a high pink at the cheek-bones.

The wind swept around the corner, jerking her hat, and her hand flew up to it.  There was a fair stream of passers-by even here, and occasionally one turned for a backward glance at her standing there so frankly indeterminate.

Suddenly Miss Slayback adjusted her tam-o’-shanter to its flop over her right ear, and, drawing off a pair of dark-blue silk gloves from over immaculately new white ones, entered Ceiner’s Cafe Hungarian.  In its light she was not so obviously blonder than young, the pink spots in her cheeks had a deepening value to the blue of her eyes, and a black velvet tam-o’-shanter revealing just the right fringe of yellow curls is no mean aid.

First of all, Ceiner’s is an eating-place.  There is no music except at five cents in the slot, and its tables for four are perpetually set each with a dish of sliced radishes, a bouquet of celery, and a mound of bread, half the stack rye.  Its menus are well thumbed and badly mimeographed.  Who enters Ceiner’s is prepared to dine from barley soup to apple strudel.  At something after six begins the rising sound of cutlery, and already the new-comer fears to find no table.