Young People's Pride by Stephen Vincent Benet

Tea for two at the Gondolier, that newest and quotation-marked / "Quaintest" of Village tea rooms. The chief points in the Gondolier's / "quaintness" seem to be that it is chopped up into as many little / partitions as a roulette wheel and that all food has to be carried up / from a cellar that imparts even to orange marmalade a faint persuasive / odor of somebody else's wash. Still, during the last eight months, the / Gondolier has been a radical bookstore devoted to bloody red pamphlets, / a batik shop full of strange limp garments ornamented with decorative / squiggles, and a Roumanian Restaurant called "The Brodska" whose menu / seemed to consist almost entirely of old fish and maraschino cherries.

The wispy little woman from Des Moines who conducts the Gondolier at / present in a series of timid continual flutters at actually leading the / life of the Bohemian untamed, and who gives all the young hungry-looking / men extra slices of toast because any one of them might be Vachel / Lindsay in disguise, will fail in another six weeks and then the / Gondolier may turn into anything from a Free Verse Tavern to a Meeting / Hall for the Friends of Slovak Freedom. But at present, the tea is much / too good for the price in spite of its inescapable laundry tang, / and there is a flat green bowl full of Japanese iris bulbs in the / window -- the second of which pleases Mrs. Severance and the first Ted.