Verbeena, you betcher, was different from her brother despite all that had otherwise been done for and to her. Anybody could see she was violently alive, that she had verve to the crescendo of the fluorescent.
LORD TAWDRY, FROM A PORTRAIT BY HEVVINS IN THE ANCESTRAL CASTLE AT MAYONNAISE-ON-LETTYS.
Strangely enough, she was smaller than her brother. But she had a pair of shoulders did Verbeena and her ball gown revealed the ripple of the steel muscles on her young arms.
Straddling her chair on the platform she kicked up her heels in her boyish, athletic manner and snapped a smoking cigarette into the air every once in a while, catching it by the lighted end in her firm, proud, scornful, obstinate, determined, appealing, impulsive, unsatisfied sweet mouth.
Twice she missed and set fire to her skirt, but what did this boyish, lovely creature care about a skirt?
Her eyes were marvelous. They were crossed between a sea green and a pond blue but her black eyebrows were obviously alike and offered strange contrast to the loose, red, bobbed curls she wore, clubbed about her ears.
In the course of training her Lord Tawdry had always attended to the style in which she wore her hair.
In the company at the Hotel Biscuit dance all the men dropped their partners, even if they weren’t their wives, and trooped toward Verbeena, an international galaxy of adorers comprising Scotch, Irish, Spanish, Scandinavians, Malays, Canadians, Moabites and—well, that will be about enough—but toward all of them who pleaded, some with twanging guitars, others with ukeleles and one with a harmonica for a chance to clasp her boyish beauty in the ardor of a kicky dance, Miss Mayonnaise had but one insouciant, petulant reply: