MURIEL: Oh, let's have music!
MAURY: Tana will render the love song of an eye, ear, nose, and throat specialist.
(Amid some confusion due to the fact that TANA has retired for the night, preparations are made for the performance. The pajamaed Japanese, flute in hand, is wrapped in a comforter and placed in a chair atop one of the tables, where he makes a ludicrous and grotesque spectacle. PARAMORE is perceptibly drunk and so enraptured with the notion that he increases the effect by simulating funny-paper staggers and even venturing on an occasional hiccough.)
PARAMORE: (To GLORIA) Want to dance with me?
GLORIA: No, sir! Want to do the swan dance. Can you do it?
PARAMORE: Sure. Do them all.
GLORIA: All right. You start from that side of the room and I'll start from this.
MURIEL: Let's go!
(Then Bedlam creeps screaming out of the bottles: TANA plunges into the recondite mazes of the train song, the plaintive "tootle toot-toot" blending its melancholy cadences with the "Poor Butter-fly (tink-atink), by the blossoms wait-ing" of the phonograph. MURIEL is too weak with laughter to do more than cling desperately to BARNES, who, dancing with the ominous rigidity of an army officer, tramps without humor around the small space. ANTHONY is trying to hear RACHAEL'S whisper—without attracting GLORIA's attention....
But the grotesque, the unbelievable, the histrionic incident is about to occur, one of those incidents in which life seems set upon the passionate imitation of the lowest forms of literature. PARAMORE has been trying to emulate GLORIA, and as the commotion reaches its height he begins to spin round and round, more and more dizzily—he staggers, recovers, staggers again and then falls in the direction of the hall ... almost into the arms of old ADAM PATCH, whose approach has been rendered inaudible by the pandemonium in the room.