"Ain't it great?" inquired every charitable ticket-buyer. "_In six and three-quarter minutes!_ No regiments of waiters. Everything automatic. Say, that H. R. is a wonder!"
It naturally took some time before they remembered to look at the starving people who were sitting at the long tables waiting to be fed.
They saw haggard faces, sunken-eyed, pale-lipped men and women and children. They saw trembling hands that fidgeted with knives and forks that were obviously unnecessary. They saw women at the tables trying to still whining children. They saw gray-haired heads fallen on soup-plates utterly exhausted from inanition.
They saw starving and penniless human beings by the thousand.
And the spectators, hosts of these guests, ran over the faces and the forms of the men and women and children--all alike in that all were hungry and all were penniless. And the same thought struck them all, and they expressed it audibly, with gusto, as though they were original thinkers, with the modesty of professional epigrammatists. All the spectators said:
New York's great big heart had spoken in no uncertain accents!
Just after the applause that greeted Grace Goodchild's arrival had begun to subside, and the public was about to demand that the feast, for which they had paid, begin a bugle blew.
H. R., who was Fame since he was initials, entered the arena.
Instantly the well-trained Public Sentiment Corps began to shout, angrily:
That, as intended by H. R., made all rise to their feet.
Then, and only then, did H. R. advance into the arena, followed by the Mayor of the City of New York, the Bishop of the Diocese of the same, and the other dignitaries.
The applause that came from the members of the Society of American Sandwich Artists was not applause. It was fervor, frenzy, fury. They yelled and shouted with the enthusiastic recklessness of free men who knew that after their throats went dry ten beers, also free, would cure.
The audience, seeing and hearing their fellow-men applaud, felt themselves left out of something. They were free men. They therefore also applauded, even more frenziedly.
No beers; not even knowledge; merely insistence upon political equality!
In front of the Goodchild box H. R., whose progress resembled Buffalo Bill's minus the curls, paused. He looked intently at Grace Goodchild.