"Western circuit—Western circuit—"
They hurried down a curving, white-tile corridor, rows of doors with eye-like glass panes were lined up on each side, and the tick-tack of typewriters penetrating. Della's breath came heavier and faster, and a layer of vivid pink showed through the artificial red.
"You wait out here a minute, Della. I wanna step in here, at the Bijou, and see if Louis Rafalsky is doin' anything this morning. Then we'll shoot up to the Empire—"
"Sure—I—I'll wait, Ysobel."
She leaned against the wall and placed her hand over the region of her lace yoke and heart, as if she would regulate their heaving.
A flash of cerise plume, a jangle of chatelaine jewelry, and Ysobel disappeared behind one of the doors, her many-angled silhouette flashing against the far side of the ground glass.
Della breathed in deep and gulped in her dry, hot throat; her fingers, the damp cold born of nervousness, curled in toward her warm palms. She daubed at her lips with a handkerchief.
Simultaneously a door opposite her opened, and a short, bullet-headed figure in a light checked suit, and a diamond horseshoe scarf-pin that caught the points of light stepped out into the pale nimbus cast by the white signal-light of an up-going elevator.
With a gasp that caught in her throat Della darted in her too narrow skirt across the corridor, reached out, and grasped the light-gray coat-sleeve.
"Look," she cried, thrusting herself between him and the trellis-work of the elevator-shaft and throwing back her head so that her bare neck, soft as the breast feathers of a dove, rose and fell with a dove's agitated breathing, "Look—I'm here!"