"Son, go' long—an tek care o' yo'self."
Light-heartedly Ballet galloped down the stairs. Half-way to the garbage-strewn piazza, he paused to lean over the banister and peep into the foggy depths of the kitchen serving the occupants of the bawdy rooms on the street-level of the tenement.
"Up orready?" shouted Ballet, throwing a sprig of cane peeling at a plump black figure engaged in the languid task of turning with a long flat piece of board a tache of bubbling starch.
In a disorderly flight to the piazza one foot landed on the seed of a part-skinned alligator pear. He deftly escaped a fall. Quickly righting himself, he made for the misty, stewy inclosure—dashing under clothes lines, overturning a bucket of wash blue, nearly bursting a hole in some one's sunning, gleaming sheet.
Dark kitchen; slippery and smoky; unseen vermin and strange upgrowth of green snaky roots swarmed along the sides of washtubs, turpentine cans, taches, stable ironware.
Presiding over one of the taches was a girl. She was slim, young, fifteen years old. Her feet were bare, scales, dirt black, dirt white, sped high up her legs. The fragment of a frock, some peasant thing, once colored, once flowered, stood stiff, rigid off the tips of her curving buttocks.
Grazing the ribs of the tache with the rod, Blanche, blithely humming
Wha' de use yo' gwine shawl up
Now dat yo' character gone—
Dicky jump, Dicky jump
Ah wan' fi' lie down!
was unaware of Ballet slowly crouching behind her.
Becoming clairvoyantly tongue-tied, Blanche suddenly turned, and Ballet came up to her.