Phases of an Inferior Planet. Glasgow Ellen Anderson Gholson
seat. She raised her hand to her loosened hair, half frowned, and glanced at the floor with demure indifference.
Beside her sat an Irishwoman with a heavy basket and a black bruise upon her temple. The girl looked at the woman and the bruise with an expression of repugnance. The repugnance was succeeded by a tidal wave of self-commiseration. She pitied herself that she was forced to make use of public means of conveyance. The onions in the Irishwoman's basket offended her nostrils.
Her gaze returned to her lap. As daintily as she had withdrawn her person from contact with the woman beside her, she withdrew her finely strung senses from contact with the odor of onions and the closeness of the humanity hemming her in.
She sat in disdainful self-absorption. Her sensitive features became impassive, her head drooped, the green in her eyes faded into gray, and the lashes obscured them. The shadow of her heavy hair rested like a veil upon her face.
When the car reached Ninth Avenue she got out, walked to Thirtieth Street, and crossed westward. Facing her stood the immense and unpicturesque apartment-house known as "The Gotham" – a monument of human Philistinism and brownstone-finished effrontery. She entered and passed through the unventilated hall to the restaurant at the rear.
As she crossed the threshold, a man seated at one of the larger tables looked up.
"My dear girl," he said, reproachfully, "lateness for dinner at The Gotham entails serious consequences. We were just planning a search-party."
His right-hand neighbor spoke warningly. "Don't believe him, Miss Musin; he refused to get uneasy until he had finished his dinner."
"When one is empty," retorted the first, "one can't get even uneasy. Anxiety can't be produced from a void."
The girl nodded good-evening, took her seat, and unfolded her napkin. The first gentleman passed her the butter, the second the water-bottle. The first was named Nevins. He was fair and pallid, with a long face that would have been round had nature supplied gratification as well as instinct. His shoulders were high and narrow, suggesting the perpetual shrug with which he met his fate. He was starving upon an artistic career. The second gentleman – Mr. Sellars – was sleek and middle-aged. Providence had intended him for a poet; life had made of him a philosopher – and a plumber. He was still a man of sentiment.
At the head of the table sat Mr. Paul – an apostle of pessimism, whose general flavor marked the pessimist rather than the apostle. The peculiarity of his face was its construction – the features which should have gone up coming down, and the features which should have come down going up. Perhaps had Mr. Paul himself moralized upon the fact, which is not likely, he would have concluded that it was merely a physical expression of his mental attitude towards the universe. He had long since arrived at the belief that whatever came in life was the thing of all others which should have kept away, and its coming was sufficient proof of its inappropriateness. He had become a pessimist, not from passion, but from principle. He had chosen his view of the eternal condition of things as deliberately as he would have selected the glasses with which to survey a given landscape. Having made his choice, he stood to it. No surreptitious favors at the hands of Providence were able to modify his honest conviction of its general unpleasantness.
The remaining persons at this particular table were of less importance. There was Miss Ramsey, the journalist, who was pretty and faded and harassed, and who ate her cold dinner, to which she usually arrived an hour late, in exhausted silence. Miss Ramsey was one whom, her friends said, adversity had softened; but Miss Ramsey herself knew that the softness of adversity is the softness of decay. There was Mr. Ardly, a handsome young fellow, who did the dramatic column of a large daily, and who regarded life as a gigantic jag, facing failure with facetiousness and gout with inconsequence. There was Mr. Morris, who was thin, and Mr. Mason, who was fat, and Mr. Hogarth, who was neither.
The restaurant consisted of a long and queerly shaped room. It had originally been divided into two apartments, but when the house had passed into the present management the partition had been torn down, and two long and narrow tables marked the line where the division had been. The walls were dingy and unpapered. Where the plaster was of an unusual degree of smokiness, several cheap chromos, in cheaper frames, had been hung, like brilliant patches laid upon a dingy background. Above the chromos lingered small bunches of evergreen – faded and dried remnants of the last holiday season – and from the tarnished and fly-specked chandelier hung a withered spray of mistletoe.
The room was crowded. There was not so much as a vacant seat at the tables. The hum of voices passed through the doors and into the rumble of the street without. In a far corner a lady in a blouse of geranium pink was engaged in catching reckless flies for the sustenance of the chameleon upon her breast; nearer at hand a gentleman was polishing his plate and knife with his napkin. It was warm and oppressive, and the voices sounded shrilly through the glare. The girl whom they had called "Miss Musin" looked up with absent-minded abruptness.
"I had as soon wear wooden shoes as eat with a pewter fork!" she remarked, irritably.
Mr. Nevins shook his flaxen head and laid down his spoon.
"So long as it remains a question of forks," he observed, "let us give thanks. Who knows when it may become one of food?" Then he sighed. "If it is only a sacrifice of decency, I'm equal to it, but I refuse to live without food."
"The audacity of youth!" commented Mr. Sellars, the philosopher. "I said the same at your age. But for taking the conceit out of one, commend me to experience."
"From a profound study of the subject," broke in Mr. Paul, grimly, "I have been able to calculate to a nicety that each one of these potatoes, taken internally, lessens an hour of one's existence. As a method of self-destruction" – and he proceeded to help himself – "there is none more efficacious than an exclusive diet of Gotham potatoes. Allow me to pass them." He looked at Miss Musin, but Mr. Nevins rose to the occasion.
"After such an analysis, my gallantry forbids," and he intercepted the dish.
The girl glanced up at him.
"Extinction long drawn out is boring," she said. "And is food the only factor of human life? It may be the most important, I admit, but important things should not always be talked of."
"I declare it quite staggers me," interrupted a cheerful individual, who was Mr. Morris, "to think of the number of things that should not be talked of – some amazingly interesting things, too! Do you know, sometimes I wonder if social intercourse will not finally be reduced to a number of persons assembling to sit in silent meditation upon the subjects which are not to be spoken of? One so soon exhausts the absolutely correct topics."
"We are a nation of prudes," declared Mr. Paul, with emphasis, "and there is no vice that rots a people to the core so rapidly as the vice of prudery. All our good red blood has passed into a limbo of social ostracism along with ladies' legs."
"I was just thinking," commented Mr. Hogarth, who aspired to the rakish and achieved the asinine, "that the last-named subject had been particularly in evidence of late. What with the ballet and the bicycle – " He blushed and glanced at Miss Musin.
She was smiling. "Oh, I don't object," she said, "so long as they are well shaped."
Mr. Nevins upheld her from an artistic stand-point.
"I hold," he said, authoritatively, "that indecency can only exist where beauty is wanting. All beauty is moral. I have noticed in regard to my models – "
"On the contrary," interrupted Mr. Paul, "there is no such thing as beauty. It is merely the creation of a diseased imagination pursuing novelty. We call nature beautiful, but it is only a term we employ to express a chimera of the senses. Nature is not beautiful. Its colors are glaringly defective. It is ugly. The universe is ugly. Civilization is ugly. We are ugly – "
"Oh, Mr. Paul!" said Miss Musin, reproachfully.
"Our one consolation," continued Mr. Paul, in an unmoved voice, "is the knowledge that if we could possibly have been uglier we should have been so created. Providence would have seen to it."
"When Providence provided ugliness," put in Mr. Morris, good-naturedly, "it provided ignorance along with it."
Mr. Ardly, who was eating