"How about Tempest?" said Eshwell, stopping short halfway up.
"Tempest—hell!" retorted Mabel. "Come on."
"What do you mean?" cried Violet, whose left eye was almost closed by a bruise.
"We'll not see him again. Come on."
"Bob!" shrieked Violet at Burlingham. "Do you hear that?"
"Yes," said he. "Keep calm, and come on."
"Aren't you going to do anything?" she screamed, seizing him by the coat tail. "You must, damn it—you must!"
"I got the policeman to telephone headquarters," said
Burlingham. "What else can be done? Come on."
And a moment later the bedraggled and dejected company filed into a cheap levee restaurant. "Bring some coffee," Burlingham said to the waiter. Then to the others, "Does anybody want anything else?" No one spoke. "Coffee's all," he said to the waiter.
It came, and they drank it in silence, each one's brain busy with the disaster from the standpoint of his own resulting ruin. Susan glanced furtively at each face in turn. She could not think of her own fate, there was such despair in the faces of these others. Mabel looked like an old woman. As for Violet, every feature of her homeliness, her coarseness, her dissipated premature old age stood forth in all its horror. Susan's heart contracted and her flesh crept as she glanced quickly away. But she still saw, and it was many a week before she ceased to see whenever Violet's name came into her mind. Burlingham, too, looked old and broken. Eshwell and Pat, neither of whom had ever had the smallest taste of success, were stolid, like cornered curs taking their beating and waiting in silence for the blows to stop.