As he stood in front of Delmonico's lighting a cigarette one night he
saw two hansoms drawn up close to the curb, waiting for a chance drunken
fare. The outmoded cabs were worn and dirty--the cracked patent leather
wrinkled like an old man's face, the cushions faded to a brownish
lavender; the very horses were ancient and weary, and so were the
white-haired men who sat aloft, cracking their whips with a grotesque
affectation of gallantry. A relic of vanished gaiety!
Anthony Patch walked away in a sudden fit of depression, pondering the
bitterness of such survivals. There was nothing, it seemed, that grew
stale so soon as pleasure.
On Forty-second Street one afternoon he met Richard Caramel for the
first time in many months, a prosperous, fattening Richard Caramel,
whose face was filling out to match the Bostonian brow.
"Just got in this week from the coast. Was going to call you up, but I
didn't know your new address."
"We've moved."
Richard Caramel noticed that Anthony was wearing a soiled shirt, that
his cuffs were slightly but perceptibly frayed, that his eyes were set
in half-moons the color of cigar smoke.
"So I gathered," he said, fixing his friend with his bright-yellow eye.
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