"If you listen to the line of talk around this table—how I knocked 'em for a goal in Philly, and how Branwyn's been after me for seven months to get me to sign a contract, and how Bruce Fairchild got a company of his own because he was jealous of the way I was stealing the film from him—after a little of that, anything sounds clever. Dance, Florine?"
Back in Zenith, Ike Weber, even if he'd been the biggest business man in town, would have hesitated to ask Clancy Deane so casually to dance with him. The Deanes were real people in Zenith, even though they'd never had much money. But great-grandfather Deane had seen service in '47 in Mexico, had been wounded at the storming of Chapultepec; and grandfather Clancy had been Phil Sheridan's aide. That sort of thing mattered a whole lot in Zenith, even to-day.
But Clancy had come to New York, to Broadway, with no snobbery. All her glorious ancestry hadn't prevented her from feeling mighty lucky when Mr. Frank Miller made her his stenographer. She'd come to New York, to Broadway, to make a success, to lift herself forever beyond the Mr. Frank Millers and their factories. So it was not disinclination to letting Ike Weber's arm encircle her that made Clancy hesitate. She laughed, as he said,
"Maybe you think, because I'm a little fat, that I can't shake a nasty toe, Florine?"
"I—I'm awfully hungry," she confessed. "And—what are these things?"
She looked down at the plate before her, on which were placed almost a dozen varieties of edibles, most of them unfamiliar.
Weber laughed.
"Florine, I like you!" he declared. "Why, I don't believe you know what a four-flusher is. This your first Broadway party?"
"I never saw New York until this afternoon," she confessed.
Weber eyed her closely.