"Dancing and first-row promenade specialty."
"Dancing and first—"
"Say, you ain't unlearnt it already, have you?"
"No—no."
Down four flights of narrow, unlit stairs with their gauzy laughter, lingering in black hall corners, and then out into a sunlit morning.
At the end of the tall-walled block, lined on both sides with brownstone, straight-front phalanxes of rooming-houses, a segment of Broadway, flashing with automobiles, darting pedestrians, white-façaded buildings, and sun-reflecting windows, flowed like a mountain stream in spring.
"Gee—Ysobel, look at that jam, will you!"
"Well, whatta you know! There goes Vance Dudley! If you want to know what kind of work I do, ask Vance. Me and him did a duet solo in a two-a-day musical sketch that would have landed us on Broadway sure if the lead hadn't put in his lady friend when she came in off the road, flat. I'll show you my notices sometime. That act was good enough for a Hy Myers house if it had been worked right."
"I bet you're grand, Ysobel—your cute little feet and all."
"Ask any of 'em around the offices about me. I could soft-shoe Clarice off the 'Winter Revue' this minute if—if I wasn't what they call in the profesh a—a tin saint. I kinda got my ideas about things—"