“You win,” answered Harry, laughing again.
“Well, I’ve got to go now,” Mabel said. “Papa doesn’t like to be kept waitin’, you know.”
“Be sure and don’t leave him anything,” Campbell replied. “A girl got expelled from the Flappers’ Union the other day—they all got sore at her because she overlooked a ten-spot in the upper vest-pocket.”
“You’re talkin’ to the president of the Union—don’t be funny,” answered Mabel.
Blanche joined in the laughter now and then—Campbell’s humor was hard to resist. A stocky man of medium height, whose feet were always tapping the floor as though they had a light itch to be dancing, he rarely ever departed from the bon-mots that constituted his chief stock-in-trade. His mind was intelligent in worldly ways, and a blank otherwise, but he was quite aware of his ignorances and careful not to expose them. He had a long, narrow face, with a slanting nose, mobile lips, and a twinkling, lazy cruelty in his eyes. His thick brown hair was burnished and pasted down on his head, and he wore the latest, loose-trousered clothes, in shades of gray and brown, with multicolored scarves, and a diamond ring on one of his fingers. He was a coarse sensualist grown careless from many feminine captures, and he had held back in Blanche’s regard from the feeling that she would “have to come to him first.” Still, he was becoming aware of an increasing urge toward her, moved by something in her face and figure that “hit it off just right.” She wasn’t nearly as pretty as tens of Broadway girls whom he knew, but she had an unspoiled swerve and sturdiness that attracted him, and in addition, he felt that she knew much more than many other women of his acquaintance—that she was not quite as shallow, or as palpably scheming, as most of his retinue were.
He left the apartment with her, and they hailed a taxicab and were driven to his cabaret off Upper Broadway. His turn only came on at eleven o’clock when the after-theater crowd poured into the place, and he sat with Blanche at one of the tables, and endlessly greeted his “friends,” and adulterated glasses of ginger-ale with the contents of a silver flask carried in his hip-pocket.
The Golden Mill was a resplendent, baroque cabaret, with a large, electrically lit windmill, made of gold silk stretched over a framework, standing over the stage. The jazz-band sat just below the stage, between the carpeted runways on which the performers descended to the dance floor. Men and women, half of them in evening clothes, chattered and laughed at the surrounding tables, with a macabre heartiness that sometimes lessened to betrayals of the underlying dullness.
The whisky began to knock about in Blanche’s heart to a cruelly victorious feeling—Campbell thought he was so darn smart, didn’t he? Well, he’d have to go some to get her, just the same. Girls were always falling for a celebrity of his kind, and she’d treat him to a novelty. Still, he made her laugh and forget the rest of her world, and she didn’t mind if he caressed her to a certain extent (not too much and not too little).
“Y’know, you’re a royal-flush to me,” said Campbell. “I’d win the pot with you, any day in the year.”
“You’ll win the air ’f you get too gay,” she answered, merrily.