Lon Price then said he’d been talking a little himself to people he met in different places and they might not be born New Yorkers but they certainly didn’t know anything beyond the city limits.  At this he looks around at the crowded tables in this palm grill and says very bitterly that he’ll give any of us fifty to one they ain’t a person in the place that ever so much as even heard of Price’s Addition to Red Gap.  And so the talk went for a little, with Jake Berger ever and again crooning to the waiter for another round of stingers.  I’d had two, so I stayed out on the last round.  I told Jake I enjoyed his hospitality but two would be all I could think under till they learned to leave the dash of chloroform out of mine.  Jake just looked kindly at me.  He’s as chatty as Mount McKinley.

But I was glad to see the boys more cheerful, so I said I’d get my lumpiest jewels out of the safe and put a maid and hairdresser to work on me so I’d be a credit to ’em at dinner and then we’d spend a jolly evening at some show.  Jeff said he’d also doll up in his dress suit and get shaved and manicured and everything, so he’d look like one in my own walk of life.  Ben was already dressed for evening.  He had on a totally new suit of large black and white checks looking like a hotel floor from a little distance, bound with braid of a quiet brown, and with a vest of wide stripes in green and mustard colour.  It was a suit that the automobile law in some states would have compelled him to put dimmers on; it made him look egregious, if that’s the word; but I knew it was no good appealing to his better nature.  He said he’d have dinner ordered for us in another palm grill that had more palms in it.

Jake Berger spoke up for the first time to any one but a waiter.  He asked why a palm room necessarily?  He said the tropic influence of these palms must affect the waiters that had to stand under ’em all day, because they wouldn’t take his orders fast enough.  He said the languorous Southern atmosphere give ’em pellagra or something.  Jeff Tuttle says Jake must be mistaken because the pellagra is a kind of a Spanish dance, he believes.  Jake said maybe so; maybe it was tropic neurasthenia the waiters got.  Ben said he’d sure look out for a fresh waiter that hadn’t been infected yet.  When I left ’em Jake was holding a split-second watch on the waiter he’d just given an order to.

By seven P.M.  I’d been made into a work of art by the hotel help and might of been observed progressing through the palatial lobby with my purple and gold opera cloak sort of falling away from the shoulders.  Jeff Tuttle observed me for one.  He was in his dress suit all right, standing over in a corner having a bell-hop tie his tie for him that he never can learn to do himself.  That’s the way with Jeff; he simply wasn’t born for the higher hotel life.  In his dress suit he looks exactly like this here society burglar you’re always seeing a picture of in the papers.  However,