One
She was a small, well-formed package of dynamite. A pocket edition Venus — high-breasted, thin-waisted, smooth-hipped with large, brown eyes and taffy-coloured hair. She couldn’t weigh much over a hundred pounds, but she was perfect, and she was buzzing like an angry hornet.
The suave individual who ran the cocktail lounge was trying to explain.
A girl as perfect as she was, and as small, could write her own ticket. The manufacturers of the automobiles that used to be called ‘medium priced’ would have worshipped her as a photographic model. She’d have made an airline stewardess whose large brown eyes would have transferred the butterflies from a passenger’s stomach to his heart.
Those eyes were blazing now. She said, “What do you think I am, a street-walker?”
“It isn’t that,” the manager of the cocktail lounge assured her. “It’s a policy, a rule, a law. Unescorted women are simply not allowed in here.”
“You make me sick!” she said. “I’ve heard that unescorted-woman-business until I am absolutely nauseated.”
He had been walking as he talked, his hand placed with deferential gallantry on her arm, and now she was in the hotel lobby, safely removed from the confines of the cocktail lounge. The manager didn’t have to take any more, and he didn’t. He merely bowed, smiled, turned and got out of there, fast.
She stood for a moment in the hotel lobby, undecided and angry.
I had looked up over the top of my paper at the sound of voices. Her roving, angry eyes shifted in my direction.