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66 “Sure,” he agreed, gallantly, and forthwith she signaled the young negress who had returned as waitress, and in a moment a small table was put before them and a bottle of whisky with soda on the side—a sight that so astonished and troubled Clyde that he could scarcely speak. He had forty dollars in his pocket, and the cost of drinks here, as he had heard from the others, would not be less than two dollars each, but even so, think of him buying drinks for such a woman at such a price! And his mother and sisters and brother at home with scarcely the means to make ends meet. And yet he bought and paid for several, feeling all the while that he had let himself in for a terrifying bit of extravagance, if not an orgy, but now that he was here, he must go through with it.

And besides, as he now saw, this girl was really pretty. She had on a Delft blue evening gown of velvet, with slippers and stockings to match. In her ears were blue earrings and her neck and shoulders and arms were plump and smooth. The most disturbing thing about her was that her bodice was cut very low—he dared scarcely look at her there—and her cheeks and lips were painted—most assuredly the marks of the scarlet woman. Yet she did not seem very aggressive, in fact quite human, and she kept looking rather interestedly at his deep and dark and nervous eyes.

“You work over at the Green-Davidson, too, don’t you?” she asked.

“Yes,” replied Clyde, trying to appear as if all this were not new to him—as if he had been often in just such a place as this, amid such scenes. “How did you know?”

“Oh, I know Oscar Hegglund,” she replied. ‘“‘He comes around here once in a while. Is he a friend of yours?”

“Yes. That is, he works over at the hotel with me.”

“But you haven’t been here before.”

“No,” said Clyde, swiftly, and yet with a trace of inquiry in his own mood. Why should she say he hadn’t been here before?

“I thought you hadn’t. I’ve seen most of these other boys before, but I never saw you. You haven’t been working over at the hotel very long, have you?”

“No,” said, Clyde, a little irritated by this, his eyebrows and the skin of his forehead rising and falling as he talked—a form of contraction and expansion that went on involuntarily whenever he was nervous or thought deepiy. “What of it?”

“Oh, nothing. I just knew you hadn’t. You don’t look very much like these other boys—you look different.” She smiled