Miss Goldie Raymond stood up and glared at Mrs. Fieldstone.
"Hussy yourself!" she said. "Who are you calling a hussy? Mont, are you going to stand there and hear me called a hussy?"
Fieldstone paid no attention to this demand. He was clawing affectionately at his wife's arm and repeating, "Listen, mommer! Listen!" in anguished protest.
"I would call you what I please!" Mrs. Fieldstone panted. "I would call you worser yet; and——"
Miss Raymond, however, decided to wait no longer for a champion; and, as the sporting writers would say, she headed a left swing for Mrs. Fieldstone's chin. But it never landed, because two vigorous arms, newly whitened with an emulsion of zinc oxide, were thrown round her waist and she was dragged back into her chair.
"Don't you dare touch that lady, Goldie Raymond!" said a voice that can only be described as clear and vibrant, despite the speaker's recent exhausting solo in the second act of "Rudolph Where Have You Been." "Don't you dare touch that lady, or I'll lift the face off you!"
Miss Raymond was no sooner seated, however, than she sprang up again and with one begemmed hand secured a firm hold on the bird of paradise in Miss Vivian Haig's hat.
"No one can make a mum out of me!" she proclaimed, and at once closed with her adversary.
Simultaneously Mrs. Fieldstone shrieked aloud and sank swooning into the arms of her husband. As for Sidney Rossmore and Ralph Zinsheimer, they lingered to see no more; but at the first outcry they fled through a doorway at the end of the room. In the upper part it was fitted with a ground-glass panel that, as if in derision, bore the legend: Café for Men Only.
When they emerged a few minutes later Miss Goldie Raymond had been spirited away by the management with the mysterious rapidity of a suicide at Monte Carlo, and Miss Vivian Haig, hatless and dishevelled, was laving Mrs. Fieldstone's forehead with brandy, supplied by the management at forty cents a pony.