Angier grinned.
“Watch your pure and very blonde lady leering up at that greasy old chino! Young for it, too. Now you, Kirwin—you never believe wrong of a pretty woman, though you agree about the shortcomings of the ugly ones. But you are wrong, old top! Sin overtakes the fair, not the unlovely. Look at that girl’s dress. Disreputable! What decent woman would show all of her naked shoulders and most of her back to this crowd? Do you suppose that the chino dancing with her thinks she is decent? Not on your life he doesn’t! His decent women swathe themselves in stiff brocades and padded coats.”
“So do his indecent ones. Stick to facts.”
They ordered another round of the sickeningly sweet and depressingly lukewarm soft drinks of a reformed Manila. The straws wilted as soon as touched, and fell over the sides of the tall glasses in the manner of Victorian heroines who swoon.
The music stopped. The dancers separated, going to the different tables.
Pink and shabby, tawdry skirts; very lovely hair in long and thick curls down her back and hanging in her eyes—that variety of soft blue eye which, when angry, suggests steel heated to the white pitch, but which crinkles engagingly when merry; face hard and sophisticated—the dancer of the wager!
Easy to induce her to sit down at their table; impossible to persuade her to take a drink from the flasks with which they were armed against contingencies. She insisted on soda water—and then more soda water.
“I want something sweet and cold,” she told them. “God—how I’ve missed it! I hate places where there’s not enough ice for ice cream.”
Before the soda water arrived the music started again. Kirwin half rose from his chair and bowed ceremoniously to the girl. “Will you give me the pleasure of this dance?”
“Gee!” exclaimed the young person. “And the soda water on the way!”