"Ridiculous, let's walk. I love this anyway. Don't you, Wenny?"
The black pavement shivered in squirms and lozenges of yellow and red and green light under the feet of people scuttling home out of the wet. All the sharpness of lights and colors and sounds was padded and blotched by the slow flutter of snowflakes swirling down out of the ruddy darkness overhead to vanish in the uneven glitter of the wet streets. Fanshaw took Nan's arm and made her walk fast, up towards the electric star that revolved slowly in front of a movie on Scollay Square, leaving Wenny to saunter behind them. They had passed the outdoor market where a few women with taut lantern jaws still hovered over the nearly empty pushcarts of the vegetable sellers and where brownfaced Italians still barked their apples and peppers and artichokes, when Wenny caught up to them with: "Say, wait a minute."
They stopped outside of a nickel Odeon that belched cigarette smoke and calcium light. Overhead painted in blue letters pricked with red was the sign: Pretty Girls Upstairs.
"Ever been up there, Nan?"
Nan shook her head.
"Let's go for a minute; the most grotesque thing you ever saw."
"Absurd. We'll do no such thing," snorted Fanshaw.
Loafers and office boys on their Saturday night bat and drunken sailors and little overpainted hardfaced girls of the street who had come into the broad entrance to get out of the snow looked at them curiously as they disputed.
"I think it would be fun, Fanshaw. Come on, be a sport," said Nan.
"It'll smell fearfully," said Fanshaw under his breath.