formula of “charm,” inane, cheap, completely vulgar, and as if they had been ugly little monsters of some world of dwarfs she listened to them with a detached perspective of dislike and scorn.
One of the girls—the one already in the booth—was calling to the others in tones of playful protest, in her “cute,” mannered, empty little voice:
“Hey! theah, you all! Wheah you been! Come on, heah, man!” she cried urgently and reproachfully toward the approaching youth—“We been lookin’up an’down faw you! What you been doin’, anyhow?” she cried with reproachful curiosity. “We been waitin' heah an’waitin’heah until it seemed lak you nevah would come! We wuh about to give you up!”
“Child!” another of the girls drawled back, and made a languid movement of the hand—a move indicative of resignation and defeat. “Don’t tawk! I thought we nevah would get away…. That Jawdan woman came in to see Mothah just as me an’Jim was fixin’to go out, an’child!”—again the languid movement of exhaustion and defeat—“when that woman gits stahted tawkin’you might as well give up! No one else can git a wuhd in edgeways. I’ll declayah!” the voice went up, and the hand again made its languid movement of surrender—“I nevah huhd the lak of it in all mah days! That’s the tawkinest woman that evah lived. You’d a-died if you could a-seen the way Jim looked. I thought he was goin’to pass right out befoah we got away from theah!”
“Lady,” said Jim, who had as yet taken no part in the conversation, “you said it! It sho’ly is the truth! That sho is one tawkin’woman—an’I don’t mean maybe, eithah!” He drawled these words out with an air of pert facetiousness, and then looked round him with a complacent smirk on his young, smooth, empty face to see if his display of wit had been noticed and properly appreciated.
And Helen, passing by, kept smiling, plucking at her chin abstractedly, feeling toward these young people a weary disgust that was tinged with a bitter and almost personal animosity.
“Awful little made-up girls… funny-looking little boys… nothing to do but hang out here and loaf… walk up and down the street… and drink coca-cola all day long… and to think it seemed so wonderful to me when I was a kid, to dress up and go up town and come in here where Papa was…. How dull and cheap and dreary it all is!”
