"Ida Bell!"

"You dry up, Ida Bell! I'll do what I pl--ease with my di--uhm--di--uhm."

"If you say another word about such stuff in front of that child, I'll--"

"Well, if you don't want her to hear what she sees with her eyes all around her, come into the bedroom, then, and I can tell you something that'll bring you to your senses."

"What you can tell me I don't want to hear."

"You're afraid."

"I am, am I?"

"Yes."

With a wrench of her entire body, Miss Lola Ha.s.siebrock was across the room at three capacity strides, swung open a door there, and stood, head flung up and pressing back tears, her lips turned inward.

"All right, then--tell--"

After them, the immediately locked door resisting, Genevieve fell to batting the panels.

"Let me in! Let me in! You're fussin' about your beaux. Ray Brownell has a long face, and Charley c.o.x has a red face--red face--red face! Let me in!

In!"

After a while the ten-cent piece rolled from her clenched and knocking fist, scuttling and settling beneath the sink. She rescued it and went out, lickety-clapping down the flight of rear stairs.

Silence descended over that kitchen, and a sooty dusk that almost obliterated the table, drawn out and cluttered after the manner of those who dine frowsily; the cold stove, its pots cloying, and a sink piled high with a task whose only ending is from meal to meal.

Finally that door swung open again; the wide-shouldered, slim-hipped silhouette of Miss Ha.s.siebrock moved swiftly and surely through the kind of early darkness, finding out for itself a wall telephone hung in a small patch of hallway separating kitchen and front room. Her voice came tight, as if it were a tense coil in her throat that she held back from bursting into hysteria.

"Give me Olive, two-one-o." The toe of her boot beat a quick tattoo.

"Stag?... Say, get me Charley c.o.x. He's out in front or down in the grill or somewhere around. Page him quick! Important!" She grasped the nozzle of the instrument as she waited, breathing into it with her head thrown back.

"h.e.l.lo--Charley? That you? It's me. Loo ... _Loo_! Are you deaf, honey?

What you doing?... Oh, I got the blues, boy; honest I have. Blue as a cat.... I don't know--just the indigoes. Nothing much. Ain't lit up, are you, honey?... Sure I will. Don't bring a crowd. Just you and me. I'll walk down to Gessler's drug-store and you can pick me up there.... Quit your kidding.... Ten minutes. Yeh. Good-by."

Claxton Inn, slightly outside the city limits and certain of its decorums, stands back in a grove off a macadamized highway that is so pliant to tire that of summer nights, with tops thrown back and stars sown like lavish grain over a close sky and to a rushing breeze that presses the ears like an eager whisper, motor-cars, wild to catch up with the horizon, tear out that road--a lightning-streak of them--fearing neither penal law nor Dead Man's Curve.

Slacking only to be slacked, cars dart off the road and up a gravel driveway that encircles Claxton Inn like a lariat swung, then park themselves among the trees, lights dimmed. Placid as a manse without, what was once a private and now a public house maintains through lowered lids its discreet white-frame exterior, shades drawn, and only slightly revealing the parting of lace curtains. It is rearward where what was formerly a dining-room that a huge, screened-in veranda, very whitely lighted, juts suddenly out, and a showy hallway, bordered in potted palms, leads off that. Here Discretion dares lift her lids to rove the gravel drive for who comes there.

In a car shaped like a motor-boat and as low to the ground Mr. Charley c.o.x turned in and with a great throttling and choking of engine drew up among the dim-eyed monsters of the grove and directly alongside an eight-cylinder roadster with a snout like a greyhound.

"Aw, Charley, I thought you promised you wasn't going to stop!"

"Honey, sweetness, I just never was so dry."

Miss Ha.s.siebrock laid out a hand along his arm, sitting there in the quiet car, the trees closing over them.

"There's Yiddles Farm a little farther out, Charley; let's stop there for some spring water."

He was peeling out of his gauntlets, and cramming them into s.p.a.cious side pockets.

"Water, honey, can wash me, but it can't quench me."

"No high jinks to-night, though, Charley?"

"Sure--no."

They high-stepped through the gloom, and finally, with firmer step, up the gravel walk and into the white-lighted, screened-in porch.

Three waiters ran toward their entrance. A woman with a bare V of back facing them, and three plumes that dipped to her shoulders, turned square in her chair.

"Hi, Charley. Hi, Loo!"

"H'lo, Jess!"

They walked, thus guided by two waiters, through a light _confetti_ of tossed greetings, sat finally at a table half concealed by an artificial palm.

"You don't feel like sitting with Jess and the crowd, Loo?"

"Charley, hasn't that gang got you into enough mix-ups?"

"All right, honey; anything your little heart desires."

She leaned on her elbows across the table from him, smiling and twirling a great ring of black onyx round her small finger.

"Love me?"

"Br-r-r--to death!"

"Sure?"

"Sure. What'll you have, hon?"

"I don't care."

"Got any my special Gold Top on ice for me, George? Good. Shoot me a bottle and a special layout of _hors-d'oeuvre_. How's that, sweetness?"

"Yep."

"Poor little girl," he said, patting the black onyx, "with the bad old blues! I know what they are, honey; sometimes I get crazy with 'em myself."

Her lips trembled.

"It's you makes me blue, Charley."

"Now, now; just don't worry that big, nifty head of yours about me."