back to his poverty at any moment. He wanted to get out before he was put out. The very luxuries that enthralled him at first were intolerable now. The perfume of the women and their flowers lost its savor. Their graces had gone. They were all elbows and knees. He suffocated as in a black hole of Calcutta.
When a footman at the Café des Beaux Arts wrenched the door open and let the cool air in, it was welcome. Forbes moved to escape. But he was kept prisoner while Bob was sent as an avant courier. He returned with the bad news that he was unable even to reach a head waiter.
The car nosed round, turned with difficulty, and went to Bustanoby's. It was the same story here.
"New York's gone mad, I tell you!" Willie raved. "And nobody is as crazy as we are. To think of us going about like a gang of beggars pleading to be taken in and allowed to dance with a lot of hoodlums and muckers. Even they won't have us."
"We'll try once more," said Persis. "The Café de Ninive."
After a brief voyage farther along Broadway the suppliant outcasts entered a great hall imposingly decorated with winged bulls and other Assyrian symbols. The huge space of the restaurant was a desert of tables untenanted save by a few dejected waiters and a few couples evidently in need of solitude.
An elevator took the determined Persis and her cohort up to another thronged vestibule.
Persis had said to Willie in the car, "If you don't get us a table here I'll never speak to you again."
With this threat as a spur Little Willie accosted a large captain of waiters, who shrugged his shoulders and indicated the crowd inside and the crowd outside. Willie fumbled in his pockets, and his hand slyly met that of the captain, who glanced into his palm, then up to heaven in gratitude, and laid aside all scruple.
Willie triumphantly beckoned Persis, who approached the captain with the pouting appeal of a lady of the court to a relenting sovereign.
"Fritz," she said, "you've got to take care of us."
"How can I refuse Mees Cabot," said Fritz. "Do you weesh to seet and watch the artists, or to seet weeth the dancers?"
"We want to dance," said Persis.
"There is one table resairve for a very great patron. You shall have it. I shall lose me my poseetion, and he will tear down the beelding; but that is better as to turn away Mees Cabot and Meester Enslee."
He whispered to a horrified captain on the other side of a silk rope. The barrier was removed, and they were within the sacred inclosure, while the baffled remnant gnashed its teeth outside.
CHAPTER VII
THE room they were in was a mass of tables compacted around a central space, where professional entertainers were displaying the latest fashions in song and dance. A pair of "Texas Tommy" dancers were finishing a wild gallopade with a climax, in which the man hurled the woman aloft as if he were playing diabolo with her, caught her on his long sticks of arms, and spun her round his neck, then let her drop head first, rescuing her from a crash by the breadth of her hair, swinging her back between his legs and across his hip. When her heels touched the floor he bent her almost double and gazed Apache murder into her eyes. Her hair fell loose on cue, and then he righted her, and they were bowing to the rapturous applause. When they retired they were panting like hunted rabbits and sweating like stevedores.
And now a somewhat haggard girl, who looked as if she had forgotten how to sleep, dashed forward in a snowbird costume and sang a sleigh-bell song. Little bells jingled about her, and the crowd kept time by tapping wine-glasses with forks or spoons. Some kept time also with their rhythmic jaws.
The girl sang in a mock childish voice in the nasal dialect of the vaudevilles, with "yee-oo" for "you," and "tree-oo" for "true," and "lahv" for "love." The words of the song were too innocent, and not important enough to detain Persis, who felt herself drawn by the distant music of a turkey-trot in the farthest room. The warring counterpoint of the two orchestras only added to the lawless excitement of the throng. The dance was just over, and the dancers were settling down to their chairs, their deserted plates and glasses. The guide led them to the only empty table, whisked off the card "Reserved," and turned them over to a waiter.
While Willie scanned the supper card Mrs. Neff lapsed into reminiscence. It was the only sign she had given thus far that she had earned her white hair by age, and not by a bleach.
"Funny how this building tells the story of the last few years," she said. "A few winters ago we thought it was amusing to go to supper at a good restaurant after the theater, have something nice to eat and drink, talk a while, and go home to bed. We thought we were very devilish, and preachers railed at the wickedness of late-supper orgies. And now the place down-stairs is deserted. Just taking late supper is like going to prayer-meeting.
"Then somebody started the cabaret. And we flocked to that. We ate the filthiest stuff and drank the rottenest wine, and didn't care so long as they had some sensational dancer or singer cavorting in the aisle. They were so close you could hear them grunt, and they looked like frights in their make-up. But we thought it was exciting, and the preachers said it was awful. But it has become so tame and stupid that it is quite respectable.
"At present we are dancing in the aisles ourselves, crowding the professional entertainers off their own floors. And now the preachers and editors are attacking this. Whatever we do is wrong, so, as my youngest boy says, 'What's the use and what's the diff?'"
"Only one thing worries me," said Winifred, as she peeled her gloves from her great arms and her tiny hands. "What will come next? Even this can't keep us interested much longer."
"The next thing," Willie snapped, "will be that we'll all go into vaudeville and do flip-flaps and the split and such things before a hired audience of reformed ballet-girls."
"I hope they play a tango next," was all Persis said. "Willie, call a waiter and ask him to ask the orchestra to play a tango."
"Wait, can't you?" he protested. "Let's get something to eat ordered first. We've got to buy champagne to hold our table; but we don't have to drink the stuff. What do you want, Persis? Winifred? Mrs. Neff, what do you want?—a little caviar to give us an appetite, what? What sort of a cocktail, eh? What sort of a cocktail, uh?"
Before an answer could be made the orchestra struck up a tune of extraordinary flippance. People began to jig in their chairs, others rose and were in the stride before they had finished the mouthfuls they were surprised with; several caught a hasty gulp of wine with the right hand while the left groped for the partner. The frenzy to dance was the strangest thing about it.
"Come on, Murray!" cried Persis. "Willie, order anything. It doesn't matter." Her voice trailed after her, for she was already backing off into the maelstrom with her arms cradled in Ten Eyck's arms.
Bob Fielding, with his usual omission of speech, swept Winifred from her chair, and she went into the stream like a ship gliding from her launching-chute. Mrs. Neff looked invitingly at Willie, but he answered the implication:
"I'll not stir till I've had food."
Forbes leaned over to explain to the marooned matron:
"I wish I could ask you to honor me; but I don't know how."
She
