She vanished down the ladder.
An hour later, we, too, climbed down the ladderish stairs, my companion and I, and as we came out into the fresh quiet of Fourth Street at midnight, I had a really odd sensation.

I felt as though I had been reading a fascinating and unusual book, and had--suddenly closed it for the night.
This was one of the first of the real Village eating places which I ever knew.

Perhaps that is why it comes first to my memory as I write.
I do not know that it is more representative or more interesting than others.

But it was worth going back to.
Yet, after all, it isn't the food and drink, nor yet the unusual surroundings, that bring you back to these places.

It's the--well, one has to use, once in a while, the hard-worked and generally inappropriate word "atmosphere." Like "temperament" and "individuality" and the rest of the writer-folk's old reliables, "atmosphere" is too often only a makeshift, a lazy way of expressing something you won't take the trouble to define more expressively.