Achmed Abdullah

“ Across to Sixth Avenue and north, cuts the heart of New York. It is early; but already the great beast is stirring its limbs. Trucks rumble past. Trolley cars shoot south and north, clanking shrieking. Trumpeting automobiles whirr by with gleaming brasses. ”

“ A pawnbroker’s place is at the corner; a squat building, mouldy, acrid, red-bedaubed, the show cases garish and pathetic with the cheap luxuries of the poor, and here and there the hard flash of a good diamond, often in an old-fashioned setting. ”

“ It is not the tale of a New York which is intrinsically decent, hospitable, clean and square, and which tries to do its best, somehow, though it is pinched between the geographical limitations of Hudson and East River, the political limitations of enthusiastic, youthful Democracy and old-world British party government, the ethnological limitations of Sicilian and Syrian and Russian Jew—not to mention native-born immigrants from the, of course, chivalrous South and the, of course, big-bulking, manly, Stetson-hatted West, the climatic limitations of a biting winter and a scorching summer. ”

“ Fellows who wear spats!
Fellows who prove in speech and morals and dress that, in New York at least, the good old days of clean Americanism are gone—that vanished are the bully old props of burgess respectability. ”

“ And here, too, comes our heroine—she enters—she checks her ankle watch—she clasps a comparative stranger around the chest, and threads the higher mathematics of the dance with a noble resolve to do or die. ”

“ A poignant city, shivering, again scorching. A city around whose neck hangs the demon of civilization and progress. A city far removed from Greece’s Doric soul, from the soft peace of the Elysian Fields.
This work is in the public domain in the United States because it was published before January 1, 1929.
The longest-living author of this work died in 1945, so this work is in the public domain in countries and areas where the copyright term is the author's life plus 78 years or less. ”

“ Fellows who at the tender age of four showed, by the way in which they drag their g’s, that there was Knickbocker blood in their family. Fellows whose conscience had been hard-boiled by chronic impecuniousness. Heartless, indifferent fellows who, when Mother gets mixed up with the hind wheels of a motorcar, drawl: “I say—what are you doing?” ”

“ Here prize. dogs of every color dye gaze out of muffs or gambol about the dance floor, playfully nipping legs as high as they can see—never above the knee.
Here young men with cleft chins, noticeable for their fine lack of ruddy health, talk with equal condescension to working girl and lady Knickerbocker, borrowing money with equal condescension from both,
Here grandsons— (admonition to Editor: “Please let this stand; I mean something by it!”) —yes—grandsons teach their grandmothers to suck eggs. ”

“ Men pass in all directions, brokers and bankers, clerks and lawyers, workmen—intent, serious, purposeful. There are also women. Some are young girls hurrying to the shops. Others are dressmakers, milliners, businesswomen of all sorts. ”

“ Culture doesn’t mean an answer to every question—it means a point of view in every situation.
There are men who can keep nothing to themselves—not even their wives.
And more of the same sort—and—get it once more—“frigid even in its lust, calculating even in its intoxication.”
And so the tale proceeds. The heroine passes unscathed—more or less—through the orgies of Jack’s, the saturnalia of Childs’, the phallic worship of Ziegfeld’s Follies, the Durga-Puja of Brown’s Chop House, the bacchanalia of Churchill’s, the wicked deviltries of Terrace Garden and Lüchow’s, where Patria—Mrs. ”