When they had "done" the principal thoroughfares and Angela had bought
ivory boxes, jade bracelets, and a silver bell collar for Timmy the cat,
Nick said that the time had come to join their guide. He had engaged a man
supposed to know Chinatown inside and out, and the rendezvous was at 9:30
in Portsmouth Square, the "lungs of Chinatown"--close to the memorial
statue of Robert Louis Stevenson.
It was quiet there, and pleasant in the starlight, faintly gilded by the
street lamps. The young moon of the sixth month, which had sunk with the
sun when Angela was in Monterey, had not yet dropped beyond distant house
roofs. Its pearly profile looked down, surrounded by a clear-cut ring,
like the face of a pale saint seen through the rose-window of a cathedral.
Soon the guide came, a little dark man with a Jewish face, a German name,
an American accent, and the polite manner of an Oriental.
"What would you like the lady to see?" he asked.
"Everything you advise," said Nick. "We've dined in a Chinese restaurant,
and seen the things everybody sees. Now we'll do a few barber shops and
drug stores, and anything else queer you can think of."
"There's an old fellow," suggested the guide, "who used to be head
musician in the big Chinese theatre.
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