"Ask the girls if I don't always say old St. Louis is all to the good.
Three or four years ago, right after his wife died, I said to Ada,
I said—"
A head showed suddenly through the lining side of the mauve portières, blue-eyed, blue-shaved, and with a triple ripple of black hair trained backward.
"Hurry along there with fifty-seven, Delehanty! Heyman's got to see the line and catch that six-two Chicago flier."
Miss Delehanty fell into pose, her profile turned back over one shoulder.
"Tell him to chew a clove; it's good for breathless haste," she said, disappearing through portières into the show-room.
Miss Becker thrust herself from a hastily-found-out aperture, patting, with final touch, her belt into place.
"Have I been asking you for five years, Kess, to knock before you poke your head in on us girls?"
Mr. Leon Kessler appeared then fully between the curtains, letting them drape heavily behind him. Gotham garbs her poets and her brokers, her employers and employees, in the national pin-stripes and sack coat. Except for a few pins stuck upright in his coat lapel, Mr. Kessler might have been his banker or his salesman. Typical New-Yorker is the pseudo, half enviously bestowed upon his kind by hinter America. It signifies a bi-weekly manicure, femininely administered; a hotel lobbyist who can outstare a seatless guest; the sang-froid to add up a dinner check; spats. When Mr. Kessler tipped, it did not clink; it rustled. In theater, at each interval between acts, he piled out over ladies' knees and returned chewing a mint. He journeyed twice a year to a famous Southern spa, and there won or lost his expenses. He regarded Miss Becker, peering at her around the fluff of a suspended frock of pink tulle.
"What's the idea, Becker? Keokuk wants to see you in the wrap line."
Miss Becker swallowed hard, jamming down and pinning into a small taffy-colored turban, her hair, the exact shade of it, escaping in scallops. Carefully powdered-out lines of her face seemed to emerge suddenly through the conserved creaminess of her skin. Thirty-four, in its unguarded moments, will out. Miss Becker had almost detained twenty's waistline and twenty-two's ardent thrust of face. It was only the indentures of time that had begun to tell slightly—indentures that powder could not putty out. There was a slight bagginess of throat where the years love to eat in first, and out from the eyes a spray of fine lines. It was these lines that came out now indubitably.