From her brace of windows in the Hotel Metropolis, the street was not unlike a gully cut through mica, a honking tributary flowing into the great sea of Broadway.  A low, high-power car, shaped like an ellipse, cut through the snarl of traffic, bleating.  A woman, wrapped in a greatcoat of “baby” pelts and an almost undistinguishable dog in the cove of her arm, walked out from the Hotel Metropolis across the sidewalk and into a taxicab.  An army of derby hats, lowered slightly into the wind, moved through the white kind of darkness.  Standing there, buffeting her pink nails across her pink palms, Mrs. Connors followed the westward trend of that army.  Out from it, a face lying suddenly back flashed up at her, a mere petal riding a swift current.  But at sight of it Mrs. Blutch Connors inclined her entire body, pressing a smile and a hand against the cold pane, then turned inward, flashing on an electrolier—­a bronze Nydia holding out a cluster of frosted bulbs.  A great deal of the strong breath of a popular perfume and a great deal of artificial heat lay sweet upon that room, as if many flowers had lived and died in the same air, leaving insidious but slightly stale memories.

The hotel suite has become the brocaded tomb of the old-fashioned garden.  The kitchen has shrunk into the chafing-dish, and all the dear old concoctions that mother used to try to make now come tinned, condensed, and predigested in sixty-seven varieties.  Even the vine-covered threshold survives only in the booklets of promoters of suburban real estate.  In New York, the home-coming spouse arrives on the vertical, shunted out at whatever his layer.  Yet, when Mrs. Connors opened the door of her pink-brocaded sitting-room, her spirit rose with the soughing rise of the elevator, and Romance—­hardy fellow—­showed himself within a murky hotel corridor.

“Honeybunch!”

“Babe!” said Mr. Blutch Connors, upon the slam of the lift door.

And there, in the dim-lit halls, with its rows of closed doors in blank-faced witness thereof, they embraced, these two, despising, as Flaubert despised, to live in the reality of things.

“My boy’s beau-ful cheeks all cold!”

“My girl’s beau-ful cheeks all warm and full of some danged good cologne,” said Mr. Connors, closing the door of their rooms upon them, pressing her head back against the support of his arm, and kissing her throat as the chin flew up.

He pressed a button, and the room sprang into more light, coming out pinkly and vividly—­the brocaded walls pliant to touch with every so often a gilt-framed engraving; a gilt table with an onyx top cheerfully cluttered with the sauciest short-story magazines of the month; a white mantelpiece with an artificial hearth and a pink-and-gilt chaise-longue piled high with small, lacy pillows, and a very green magazine open and face downward on the floor beside it.

“Comin’ better, honeybunch?”