Flo and Grace regarded her with a petulant suspicion—she was of the smart, snippy kind, and furthermore, she’d better not try to go after their men; they’d pull her hair out if she did.
“Now, you all stop razzing my Blanche,” Campbell broke in. “She’s just a little girl trying to make both ends connect in the big, wicked city.”
“Razzing her!—it’s just the other way,” Simmonds said. “D’you ever balance a hot coal on the tip of your nose?”
“It only looks that way—I was out on a party last night,” Campbell replied. “I heard a good one, though, the other day. Tom Jarvey was walking along the street, and he runs into Hammond, the village cut-up. ‘I hear you was seen walkin’ with your grandmother the other day—that’s a nice thing to do,’ said Hammond. Jarvey comes back: ‘She didn’t look that way when I married her—you know how it is.’”
The rest of them laughed, and Grace said: “That’s like the husband I ditched last year. He was a prize-package until I saw him putting his false toofies in a glass uh water one night. Hot snakes!”
“Let’s call it a draw and put the phonograph on, and fox-trot,” Flo said.
The party broke into dancing, with regular intervals in which rounds of cocktails circulated. The silently dark woman sat on a couch, with a fixed smile, and occasionally chatted with Donovan, and seemed to be outside of the party, as though she were viewing it with a satiated and good-natured patience. Blanche sat beside her for a short time.
“You don’t seem to be enjoying yourself,” Blanche said, “or maybe this is how you do it.”
“Oh, I’m a good listener, and I don’t dance if I can help it,” Madge Gowan replied. “I’m not down on the world, it’s not that, but I like to sit in the audience now ’n’ then. It’s fine for your nerves and you get a different slant at what’s going on around you.”
“I’m a little like that, myself,” Blanche answered, “but this is my night for mixing in, I guess.”