Page:Christopher Morley--Tales from a rolltop desk.djvu/127

event in the café. Before long we had sampled every kind of vegetarian combination on the list, and had him busy inventing new ones. We used to ask him if he had raised a girl like that on nothing but vegetables, and he would laugh and swear that Gloria had never tasted blood until she was sixteen. It seemed queer to us that the restaurant wasn't full of her suitors. I should have thought, with a girl like her, they'd have been standing in line waiting for a look at her. I suppose that people who feed on nothing but vegetables are rather puny in such matters. It's an odd thing, but I've always noticed that most of the people who frequent these crank physical-culture and dietetic eating-places are a queer, sick-looking lot—youths with rolling Adam's apples, and sallow, soup-stained girls. Certainly our little gang, so very jovial and fancy-free, made a quaint contrast to most of the patrons of the house. In a few days we felt as if we owned the place, and had the old man slide two tables together just underneath Gloria's cash register, where we met every evening for dinner.

"As for Larsen, he was a crank on many subjects but he was no fool. He was an athletic, erect fellow with a bristling gray moustache and cropped hair and a forcible gray eye. On the wall