"All right, just for a minute."
Wenny paid the admission, and they tramped up a creaking stair littered with cigarette butts and marked with dark blotches where people had spat and through a swinging door into a tobacco-reeking place with seats. At the end of a smoky tunnel in front of a curtain the color of arsenic and gangrene five women badly stuffed into pink tights like worn dolls, twitched their legs in time to the accentless jangle of a piano. The light streamed out from them among eager red faces, moist lips, derbies, felt hats, caps shoved back on heads. At every pause in the music men whistled and shouted at the girls. Now and then a girl dropped out of the wiggling, tired dance and jerked herself off the stage or a new one joined in the invariable twitching step. Fanshaw felt the fetor of hostile bodies all about him. Standing in the back behind some sailors, holding Nan's arm firmly in his, he kept whispering in her ear: "Nan, let's get out of this." The man in front of them turned, and Fanshaw caught the bulge of his eyes as he stared at Nan.
"Come on, I'm going," he said aloud.
"Don't you go with that stiff, girlie. You stay along with me," said the man leaning drunkenly towards her. He had a yellow lean face with a hooked scar on one cheek.
"I'm going," said Nan suddenly in a cold, hard voice. "You can stay if you like, Wenny."
The door swung behind them. They brushed past some boys clattering up the stairs with shouts of laughter. Once on the pavement, Fanshaw breathed deep of the snowy air.
"We'll take the car at Scollay Square," he said in a reassuring businesslike tone. In him a voice kept saying: That dirty little kid, that dirty little kid, and exultantly, Nan can't like him after this.
Nan said nothing, but walked beside him with cold, precise steps. At the entrance to the subway, Wenny came up to them and said: "All right. Good night," in a sudden, curt tone, and went off walking fast down Hanover Street again.
The Huntington Avenue car filled up gradually with people. As it growled through the tunnel past Park and Boylston the row of faces opposite joggled as meaningless as turnips jounced over cobbles in a pushcart. And again Fanshaw throught of Albrecht Dürer's self-portrait with yellow curls and the dandified black and white flounced shirt and the calm, self-possessed mouth. If I could be like that, he was thinking, and not like these. And there's that suit I meant to have pressed today. I'll take it round after my nine o'clock class; and the weekly tests and Mrs. Gerald's dinner invitation to answer. He half closed his eyes. That wine makes me drowsy.
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