And so the golden moments flitted by, with me watching the crazy crowd, until they began to fall away and the waiters was piling chairs on the naked tables at the back of the room.  Then with some difficulty we wrenched Ben and Lon and Jeff from the next table and got out into the crisp air of dawn.  The New Yorker was now sunk deep in a trance and just stood where he was put, with his hat on the wrong way.  The other boys had cheered up a lot owing to their late social career.  Jeff Tuttle said it was all nonsense about its being hard to break into New York society, because look what he’d done in one brief evening without trying—­and he flashed three cards on which telephone numbers is written in dainty feminine hands.  He said if a modest and retiring stranger like himself could do that much, just think what an out-and-out social climber might achieve!

Right then I was ready to call it an absorbing and instructive evening and get to bed.  But no!  Ben Sutton at sight of his now dazed New Yorker has resumed his brooding and suddenly announces that we must all make a pilgrimage to West Ninth Street and romantically view his old home which his father told him to get out of twenty-five years ago, and which we can observe by the first tender rays of dawn.  He says he has been having precious illusions shattered all evening, but this will be a holy moment that nothing can queer—­not even a born New Yorker that hasn’t made the grade and is at this moment so vitrified that he’d be a mere glass crash if some one pushed him over.

I didn’t want to go a bit.  I could see that Jeff Tuttle would soon begin dragging a hip, and the streets at that hour was no place for Lon Price, with his naturally daring nature emphasized, as it were, from drinking this here imprisoned laughter of the man that owned the joint we had just left.  But Ben was pleading in a broken voice for one sight of the old home with its boyhood memories clustering about its modest front and I was afraid he’d get to crying, so I give in wearily and we was once more encased in taxicabs and on our way to the sacred scene.  Ben had quite an argument with the drivers when he give ’em the address.  They kept telling him there wasn’t a thing open down there, but he finally got his aim understood.  The New Yorker’s petrified remains was carefully tucked into the cab with Ben.

And Ben suffered another cruel blow at the end of the ride.  He climbed out of the cab in a reverent manner, hoping to be overcome by the sight of the cherished old home, and what did he find?  He just couldn’t believe it at first.  The dear old house had completely disappeared and in its place was a granite office building eighteen stories high.  Ben just stood off and looked up at it, too overcome for words.  Up near the top a monster brass sign in writing caught the silver light of dawn.  The sign sprawled clear across the building and said PANTS EXCLUSIVELY.  Still above this was the firm’s name in the same medium—­looking like a couple of them hard-lettered towns that get evacuated up in Poland.