Halfway up, the wall was all red satin or silk of something, with a lot of what they call Modern Art decoration, or that's what Nick called it—all kinds of zigzags and big flowers and everything in gold; and then above that the walls was all hung with flowers. I found they was artificial flowers, but they looked so real you had to touch 'em before you'd believe it. And some of the tables was in kind of booths fixed up so that they looked like grape arbors and all like that. And at the end of the room there was some great big yellow marble columns—it looked like real genuwine marble, though it may not have been—in front of where the orchestra played—and say, the boys in that orchestra certainly were some jazz babies all right, all coons, but they had a regular high-class musical education, Nick told me later, and the fellow that played the saxophone—say, if they got anybody better'n him in Paul Whiteman's[1] band, I want to hear him, that's all— Why say, he could make
- ↑ The Ysaye and Toscanini of America.
