United States or Haiti ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
"I think I don't know what you mean." "You're a gent." The girl's thin, coarse laughter rang out after James as he descended the steps of the quick-lunch wagon. She opened the door directly after he had closed it, and stood on the top step with the cold wind agitating her fair hair. "Say," she called after him. James turned as he walked away. "What is it?"
These lived properly in well-appointed houses in eligible localities; and their subordinates kept the work in hand during their frequent home-goings. But the ruck the rank and file had to take such marital happiness as came their way on the quick-lunch system. Now Farwell was a bachelor, rooted and confirmed. He had always shunned married men's quarters.
He slapped the china and silver down with the familiar bravura of a quick-lunch waiter, and her heart sank, remembering that she had once admired his skill. The Marquess looked up at him with a glare of rebuke as Skip posed himself patiently with one hand, knuckles down, on the table, the other on his hip, and demanded, with misplaced enthusiasm: "Well, folks, what's it goin' to be?"
There was pictures of him with a tennis racket and on a sailboat and with a mandolin and standing up with his college glee club and setting on a high-powered horse and so forth, all showing he must be a great social favourite and one born to have a good time. I wondered how he'd come to confer himself on the cashier of a quick-lunch place. I thought it must be one of these romances.
There could be no doubt that popular enthusiasm was enlisted in behalf of the "Eastern Capitalists," who were made to appear in the light of Crusaders ready to rescue a groaning people from the thrall of monopoly. The excitement approached that of a presidential election, and became the dominant topic at quick-lunch counters and in street-cars. Cheap and efficient service!
The result was that only a man with several thousand dollars could purchase one. But Henry Ford and afterward other American makers had quite a different conception. Henry Ford's earliest banker was the proprietor of a quick-lunch wagon at which the inventor used to eat his midnight meal after his hard evening's work in the shed.
You may suppose me, for the sake of argument, sitting at lunch in one of those quick-lunch restaurants in the City where men take their food so fast that it has none of the quality of food, and take their half-hour's vacation so fast that it has none of the qualities of leisure; to hurry through one's leisure is the most unbusiness-like of actions.
And the art of dining is not a question of what one has to eat it may be beans or truffles or where one eats it from a tin bucket or a mahogany table it all depends upon how; and the man who can eat in a "hash-house," an "arm-chair joint," a "beanerie," a cafeteria, a three-minute doughnut stand or any of the other quick-lunch places in as mannerly a way as if he were dining in a hotel de luxe has, we think, a pretty fair claim to the title of gentleman.
James stopped in Red Hill at a quick-lunch wagon, which was drawn up on the principal street under the lee of the town hall, went in, ordered and ate with relish some hot frankfurters, and drank some coffee. He had eaten a plentiful breakfast before starting, but the keen air had created his appetite anew.
I'd rather go back to Second avenue and frisk another quick-lunch job. Hand us a wad: that's all we want." Course it was a batty piece of work, tryin' to persuade people to let you push money on 'em; but that's just where we stood. And in the end J. Bayard wipes his brow weary and turns to me. "Well, McCabe, what do you say?" he asks. "Shall we?"
Word Of The Day