"Come, dry your face, baby."
He reached to his hip-pocket for his handkerchief, and with it a sparse shower of red and green and pink and white and blue confetti showered to the floor like snow through a spectrum. Goldie slid from his embrace and laughed—a laugh frappéd with the ice of scorn and chilled as her own chilled heart.
"Liar!" she said, and trembled as she stood.
His lips curled again into the expression that so ill-fitted his albinism.
"You little cat! You can bluff me!"
"I knew you was up at the Crescent Cotillon! I felt it in my bones. I knew you was up there when I read on the bill-boards that the Red Slipper was dancing there. I knew where you was every night while I been sittin' here waitin'! I knew—I knew—"
The piano-salesman rapped against the folding-doors thrice, with distemper and the head of a cane. At that instant the lower half of Mr. Trimp's face protruded suddenly into a lantern-jawed facsimile of a blue-ribbon English bull; his hand shot out and hurled the chair that stood between them half-way across the room, where it fell on its side against the wash-stand and split a rung.
"You—you little devil, you!"
The second-floor front beat a tattoo of remonstrance; but there was a sudden howling as of boiling surf in Mr. Trimp's ears, and the hot ember of an oath dropped from his lips.
"You little devil! You been hounding me with the quit game for eight months. Now you gotta quit!"