I let him trail me along into this jewelled palm room with tapestries and onyx pillars and prices for food like the town had been three years beleagured by an invading army.  Jake Berger is alone at our table sipping a stinger and looking embarrassed because he’ll have to say something.  He gets it over as soon as he can.  He says Ben has ordered dinner and stepped out and that Lon has stepped out to look for him but they’ll both be back in a minute, so set down and order one before this new waiter is overcome by the tropic miasma.  We do the same, and in comes Lon looking very excited in the dress suit he was married in back about 1884.

“Ben’s found one,” he squeals excitedly—­“a real genuine one that was born right here in New York and is still living in the same house he was born in.  What do you know about that?  Ben is frantic with delight and is going to bring him to dine with us as soon as he gets him brushed off down in the wash room and maybe a drink or two thrown into him to revive him from the shock of Ben running across him.  Ain’t it good, though!  Poor old Ben, looking for a born one and thinking he’d never find him and now he has!”

We all said how glad we was for Ben’s sake and Lon called over a titled aristocrat of foreign birth and ordered him to lay another place at the table.  Then he tells us how the encounter happened.  Ben had stepped out on Broadway to buy an evening paper and coming back he was sneaking a look at his new suit in a plate-glass window, walking blindly ahead at the same time.  That’s the difference between the sexes in front of a plate-glass window.  A woman is entirely honest and shameless; she’ll stop dead and look herself over and touch up anything that needs it as cool as if she was the last human on earth; while man, the coward, walks by slow and takes a long sly look at himself, turning his head more and more till he gets swore at by some one he’s tramped on.  This is how Ben had run across the only genuine New Yorker that seemed to be left.  He’d run across his left instep and then bore him to the ground like one of these juggernuts or whatever they are.  Still, at that, it seemed kind of a romantic meeting, like mebbe the hand of fate was in it.  We chatted along, waiting for the happy pair, and Jake ordered again to be on the safe side because the waiter would be sure to contract hookworm or sleeping sickness in this tropic jungle before the evening was over.  Jeff Tuttle said this was called the Louis Chateau room and he liked it.  He also said, looking over the people that come in, that he bet every dress suit in town was hired to-night.  Then in a minute or two more, after Jake Berger sent a bill over to the orchestra leader with a card asking him to play all quick tunes so the waiters could fight better against jungle fever, in comes Ben Sutton driving his captive New Yorker before him and looking as flushed and proud as if he’d discovered a strange new vest pattern.