“Oh do come and help me.... Jojo’s teasing me terribly.”
“Well I’ll twy to sit down just for a second, I’m going to dance next.... Mr. Oglethorpe’s going to wead his twanslation of the songs of Bilitis for me to dance to.”
Ellen looked from one to the other; Oglethorpe crooked his eyebrows and nodded.
Then Ellen sat alone for a long while looking at the dancing and the chittering crowded room through a dim haze of boredom.
The record on the phonograph was Turkish. Hester Voorhees, a skinny woman with a mop of hennaed hair cut short at the level of her ears, came out holding a pot of drawling incense out in front of her preceded by two young men who unrolled a carpet as she came. She wore silk bloomers and a clinking metal girdle and brassières. Everybody was clapping and saying, “How wonderful, how marvelous,” when from another room came three tearing shrieks of a woman. Everybody jumped to his feet. A stout man in a derby hat appeared in the doorway. “All right little goils, right through into the back room. Men stay here.”
“Who are you anyway?”
“Never mind who I am, you do as I say.” The man’s face was red as a beet under the derby hat.
“It’s a detective.” “It’s outrageous. Let him show his badge.”
“It’s a holdup.”
“It’s a raid.”