“Why Dutch what’s ...” The words stuck in her throat.
“Dont you like it...?” They walked on down Fourteenth, a blur of faces streamed by on either side of them. “Everything’s jake Francie,” he was saying quietly. He wore a light gray spring overcoat and a light felt hat to
match. New red pointed Oxfords glowed on his feet. “How do you like the outfit? I said to myself it wasnt no use tryin to do anythin without a tony outside.”
“But Dutch how did you get it?”
“Stuck up a guy in a cigar store. Jez it was a cinch.”
“Ssh dont talk so loud; somebody might hear ye.”
“They wouldnt know what I was talkin about.”
Mr. Densch sat in the corner of Mrs. Densch’s Louis XIV boudoir. He sat all hunched up on a little gilt pinkbacked chair with his potbelly resting on his knees. In his green sagging face the pudgy nose and the folds that led from the flanges of the nostrils to the corners of the wide mouth made two triangles. He had a pile of telegrams in his hand, on top a decoded message on a blue slip that read: Deficit Hamburg branch approximately $500,000; signed Heintz. Everywhere he looked about the little room crowded with fluffy glittery objects he saw the purple letters of approximately jiggling in the air. Then he noticed that the maid, a pale mulatto in a ruffled cap, had come into the room and was staring at him. His eye lit on a large flat cardboard box she held in her hand.
“What’s that?”