swaying bodies. A tinkle of glassware, snort of trombones, whang of
banjos. The newspaper man looked on and listened through a film.

The brazen patter of his young friend rippled on. A growing gamin
coarseness in her talk with a nervous, restless twitter underneath. Her
dark child eyes, perverse under their touch of black paint, swung eagerly
through the crowd. Her talk of Johns, of dumb times and moldy times, of
classy times and classy memories varied only slightly. She liked dancing
and amusement parks. Automobile riding not so good. And besides you had to
be careful. There were some Johns who thought it cute to play caveman.
Yes, she'd had a lot of close times, but they wouldn't get her. Never, no,
never no more. Anyway, not while there was music and dancing and a
whoop-de-da-da in the amusement parks.

The newspaper man, listening, thought, "An infant gone mad with her dolls.
Or no, vice has lost its humanness. She's the symbol of new sin--the
unhuman, passionless whirligig of baby girls and baby boys through the
cabarets."

* * * * *

They came back from a dance and continued to sit. The din was still
mounting. Entertainers fighting against the racket. Music fighting against
the racket. Bored men and women finally achieving a bedlam and forgetting
themselves in the artifice of confusion.

The newspaper man looking at his young friend saw her taking it in. There
was something he had been trying to fathom about her during her breathless
chattering. She talked, danced, whirled, laughed, let loose giggling
cries. And yet her eyes, the part that the rouge pot or the bead stick