"Do you often come to this place?" he asked, resting his partner against the slim back of one of the marcelled-hair brigade who, like himself, had been held up in the traffic block.
"I've never been here before. And it'll be a long time before I come again. A more gosh-awful aggregation of yells for help, than this gang of whippets," said Miss Molloy, surveying the company with a critical eye, "I've never seen. Look at that dame with the eyeglass."
"Rather weird," agreed John.
"A cry for succour," said Miss Molloy severely. "And why, when you can buy insecticide at any drug store, people let these boys with the shiny hair go around loose beats me."
John began to warm to this girl. At first, he had feared that he and she could have little in common. But this remark told him that on certain subjects, at any rate, they saw eye to eye. He, too, had felt an idle wonder that somebody did not do something about these youths.
The Buddies had stopped playing: and John, glowing with the strange new spirit of confidence which had come to him, clapped loudly for an encore.
But the Buddies were not responsive. Hitherto, a mere tapping of the palms had been enough to urge them to renewed epileptic spasms; but now an odd lethargy seemed to be upon them, as if they had been taking some kind of treatment for their complaint. They were sitting, instruments in hand, gazing in a spellbound manner at a square-jawed person in ill-fitting dress clothes who had appeared at the side of Mr. Baermann. And the next moment, there shattered the stillness a sudden voice that breathed Vine Street in every syllable.
"Ladies and gentlemen," boomed the voice, proceeding, as nearly as John could ascertain, from close to the main entrance, "will you kindly take your seats."
"Pinched!" breathed Miss Molloy in his ear. "Couldn't you have betted on it!"
Her diagnosis was plainly correct. In response to the request, most of those on the floor had returned to their tables, moving with the dull resignation of people to whom this sort of thing has happened before: and, enjoying now a wider range of vision, John was able to see that the room had become magically filled with replicas of the sturdy figure standing beside Mr. Baermann. They were moving about among the tables, examining with an offensive interest the bottles that stood thereon and jotting down epigrams on the subject in little notebooks. Time flies on swift wings in a haunt of pleasure like the Mustard Spoon, and it was evident that the management, having forgotten to look at its watch, had committed the amiable error of serving alcoholic refreshments after prohibited hours.