“Come on back, Pudge,” said Euston Phipps, their escort.
“You too, Brady.”
He followed the ladies back — tall, bold, swagger — a young alcoholic with one sound lung.
He was a good golfer.
Pert boys rushed from the crowded booths and tables to the fountain, coming up with a long slide.
They shouted their orders rudely, nagging the swift jerkers glibly, stridently.
“All right, son.
Two dopes and a mint Limeade.
Make it snappy.”
“Do you work around here, boy?”
The jerkers moved in ragtime tempo, juggling the drinks, tossing scooped globes of ice-cream into the air and catching them in glasses, beating swift rhythms with a spoon.
Seated alone, with thick brown eyes above her straw regardant, Mrs. Thelma Jarvis, the milliner, drew, in one swizzling guzzle, the last beaded chain of linked sweetness long drawn out from the bottom of her glass.
Drink to me only with thine eyes.
She rose slowly, looking into the mirror of her open purse.
Then, fluescent, her ripe limbs moulded in a dress of silk henna, she writhed carefully among the crowded tables, with a low rich murmur of contrition.
Her voice was ever soft, gentle, and low — an excellent thing in a woman.
The high light chatter of the tables dropped as she went by.
For God’s sake, hold your tongue and let me love!
On amber undulant limbs she walked slowly up the aisle past perfume, stationery, rubber goods, and toilet preparations, pausing at the cigar counter to pay her check.
Her round, melon-heavy breasts nodded their heads in slow but sprightly dance.
A poet could not but be gay, in such a jocund company.
But — at the entrance, standing in the alcove by the magazine rack, Mr. Paul Goodson, of the Dependable Life, closed his long grinning dish-face abruptly, and ceased talking.
He doffed his hat without effusiveness, as did his companion, Coston Smathers, the furniture man (you furnish the girl, we furnish the house).
They were both Baptists.
Mrs. Thelma Jarvis turned her warm ivory stare upon them, parted her full small mouth in a remote smile, and passed, ambulant.
When she had gone they turned to each other, grinning quietly.
We’ll be waiting at the river.
Swiftly they glanced about them.
No one had seen.
Patroness of all the arts, but particular sponsor for Music, Heavenly Maid, Mrs. Franz Wilhelm Von Zeck, wife of the noted lung specialist, and the discoverer of Von Zeck’s serum, came imperially from the doors of the Fashion Mart, and was handed tenderly into the receiving cushions of her Cadillac by Mr. Louis Rosalsky.
Benevolently but distantly she smiled down upon him: the white parchment of his hard Polish face was broken by a grin of cruel servility curving up around the wings of his immense putty-colored nose.
Frau Von Zeck settled her powerful chins upon the coarse shelving of her Wagnerian breasts and, her ponderous gaze already dreaming on remote philanthropies, was charioted smoothly away from the devoted tradesman.
Nur wer die Sehnsucht kennt, weiss was Ich leide.
Mr. Rosalsky returned into his store.
For the third time the Misses Mildred Shuford, Helen Pendergast, and Mary Catherine Bruce drove by, clustered together like unpicked cherries in the front seat of Miss Shuford’s Reo.
They passed, searching the pavements with eager, haughty eyes, pleased at their proud appearance.
They turned up Liberty Street on their fourth swing round the circle.
Waltz me around again, Willie.
“Do you know how to dance, George?” Eugene asked.
His heart was full of bitter pride and fear.
“Yes,” said George Graves absently, “a little bit.
I don’t like it.”
He lifted his brooding eyes.
“Say, ‘Gene,” he said, “how much do you think Dr. Von Zeck is worth?”
He answered Eugene’s laughter with a puzzled sheepish grin.
“Come on,” said Eugene. “I’ll match you for a drink.”
They dodged nimbly across the narrow street, amid the thickening afternoon traffic.
“It’s getting worse all the time,” said George Graves.
“The people who laid the town out didn’t have any vision.
What’s it going to be like, ten years from now?”