She cannot be merely the cruel Babel they like to describe her:  the sunset light would not gild her so tenderly.

* * * * *

It was a great relief to us yesterday evening to see a man reading a book in the subway.  We have undergone so many embarrassments trying to make out the titles of the books the ladies read, without running afoul of the Traveller’s Aid Society, that we heaved a sigh of relief and proceeded to stalk our quarry with a light heart.  Let us explain that on a crowded train it is not such an easy task.  You see your victim at the other end of the car.  First you have to buffet your way until you get next to him.  Then, just as you think you are in a position to do a little careful snooping, he innocently shifts the book to the other hand.  This means you have got to navigate, somehow, toward the hang-handle on the other side of him.  Very well.  By the time the train gets to Bowling Green we have seen that it is a fattish book, bound in green cloth, and the author’s name begins with FRAN.  That doesn’t help much.  As the train roars under the river you manage, by leanings and twistings, to see the publisher’s name—­in this case, Longmans.  At Borough Hall a number of passengers get out, and the hunted reader sits down.  Ten to one he will hold the book in such a way that you cannot see the title.  At Nevins Street you get a seat beside him.  At Atlantic Avenue, as he is getting off, you propose your head over his shoulder in the jam on the stairs and see what you are after.  “Lychgate Hall,” by M.E.  Francis.  And in this case, success left us none the wiser.

Atlantic Avenue, by the way, always seems to us an ideal place for the beginning of a detective story. (Speaking of that, a very jolly article in this month’s Bookman, called “How Old Is Sherlock Holmes?” has revived our old ambition to own a complete set of all the Sherlock Holmes tales, and we are going to set about scouring the town for them).  Every time we pass through the Atlantic Avenue maelstrom, which is twelve times a week, we see, as plain as print, the beginning of two magazine tales.

One begins as the passengers are streaming through the gate toward the 5:27 train.  There is a very beautiful damsel who always sits on the left-hand side of the next to last car, by an open window.  On her plump and comely white hand, which holds the latest issue of a motion picture magazine, is a sparkling diamond ring.  Suddenly all the lights in the train go out.  Through the open window comes a brutal grasp which wrenches the bauble from her finger.  There are screams, etc., etc.  When the lights go on again, of course there is no sign of the criminal.  Five minutes later, Mr. Geoffrey Dartmouth, enjoying a chocolate ice cream soda in the little soft-drink alcove at the corner of the station, is astonished to find a gold ring, the stone missing, at the bottom of his paper soda container.