“Aha! Aha!” said Brady Chalmers to Miss Mary McGraw. “Where were YOU that time?”
“YOU’LL never know,” she called back. It was between them—their little secret. They laughed knowingly with joy of possession.
“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,
