“You haven’t made me believe in your ability just because you’ve been accepted by a frothy, snippy magazine,” he said. “I knew all about it the first night I met you.”
“Never mind, this means I’m going to make a name for myself,” she answered, proudly.
He gave her a fatherly smile—what a delicious combination of naïvetés and instinctive wisdoms she was.
“I felt the same way when I first broke into print,” he said. “The excitement dies down after a while, and then you don’t care so much whether people like your stuff or not. You get down to a grimly plodding gait, old dear, and you start to write only for yourself. Then each acceptance means only so many dollars and cents.”
She retorted merrily: “Wet ra-ag—don’t try to dampen my spirits. It can’t be done.”
The brazenly sensual clatter and uproar of Tony’s pounded against their minds, and even Starling, more skeptically inured to it, and knowing every hidden, sordid wrinkle in the place, became more flighty and swaggering as he danced with Blanche. It meant something, now that the girl whom he really loved was stepping out beside him, and it had become something less gross than a collection of rounders, sulky or giggling white and colored flappers, fast women, and hoodwinked sugar-papas spending their rolls to impress the women beside them. Now it was an appropriate carnival-accompaniment to his happiness.
Immersed in Starling, Blanche did not notice the group of newcomers who had seated themselves two tables behind her. They consisted of her brother Harry, another wooden-faced, overdressed man of middle age, and their thickly painted, sullen-eyed ladies of the evening. Harry was settling the details of a whisky-transaction with Jack Compton, the other man.
“We’ll have the cases there by midnight on the dot,” he said, in a low voice. “I’ve got a cop fixed up, an’ he’s gonna stand guard for us an’ say it’s K.O., ’f any one tries to butt in. We’ll have to hand him a century, though.”
“That’s all right with me,” Compton replied. “You put this deal through without slipping up and there’ll be a coupla hundred in it for you.”
“It’s as good as done,” Harry answered, with a heavy nod.