"No, you don't! Aw, no, you don't! Whatta you think I yam? Cora's! Tell it to the poodles and the great Danes!"
He shoved her with scant ceremony beyond the heavy door. She entered in one of the uncontrollable gales of laughter, the indoor heat immediately inducing the dizziness.
"Whatta you think I yam? Tell it to the poodles and the great Danes!"
Thirty minutes later, in a court-room as smeared of atmosphere as a dirty window, a bridge officer, reading from a slip of paper, singsonged to the sergeant-at-arms:
"Stella Schump. Officer Charles Costello."
How much more daringly than my poor pen would venture, did life, all of a backhanded, flying leap of who knows what centrifugal force, transcend for Stella Schump the vague boundaries of the probable.
The milky-fleshed, not highly sensitized, pinkly clean creature of an innocence born mostly of ignorance and slow perceptions, who that morning had risen sweet from eleven hours of unrestless sleep beside a mother whose bed she had never missed to share, suddenly here in slatternliness! A draggled night bird caught in the aviary of night court, lips a deep vermilion scar of rouge, hair out of scallop and dragging at the pins, the too ready laugh dashing itself against what must be owned a hiccough.
Something congenital and sleeping subcutaneously beneath the surface of her had scratched through. She was herself, strangely italicized.
A judge regarded her not unkindly. There were two of him, she would keep thinking, one merging slightly into his prototype.
She stood, gazing up. Around her swam the court-room—rows of faces; comings and goings within her railed area. And heat—the dizzying, the exciting heat—and the desire to shake off the some one at her elbow. That some one was up before her now, in a chair beside the judge, and his voice was as far away as Archie Sensenbrenner's.