I went here and there at my own dear will, bound by
no limits of space, time or comportment. I dined in weird cabarets, at
weirder _tables d'hote_ to the sound of Hungarian music and the wild
shouts of mercurial artists and sculptors. Or, again, where the night
life quivers in the electric glare like a kinetoscopic picture, and the
millinery of the world, and its jewels, and the ones whom they adorn,
and the men who make all three possible are met for good cheer and the
spectacular effect. And among all these scenes that I have mentioned I
learned one thing that I never knew before. And that is that the key to
liberty is not in the hands of License, but Convention holds it. Comity
has a toll-gate at which you must pay, or you may not enter the land
of Freedom. In all the glitter, the seeming disorder, the parade, the
abandon, I saw this law, unobtrusive, yet like iron, prevail. Therefore,
in Manhattan you must obey these unwritten laws, and then you will be
freest of the free. If you decline to be bound by them, you put on
shackles.
Sometimes, as my mood urged me, I would seek the stately, softly
murmuring palm rooms, redolent with high-born life and delicate
restraint, in which to dine.
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