Page:Firecrackers a realistic novel.pdf/164

 What I say is why sing that tripe at all? Girls are going abroad now to learn to sing Wagner and Debussy and Verdi, while the rest of the world has stopped listening to these birds. Why don't they stay at home and learn to sing George Gershwin—if they can? There's a career in that.

Bravo, Florio! Lalla applauded him, striking him on the back with her fan of rude hawk feathers.

Mrs. Pollanger was bearing down on the group.

Campaspe, she wheezed, like an asthmatic walrus, I am delighted! I was afraid you wouldn't come. And Lalla, too!

We dined together tonight, Campaspe explained, and Jack didn't get enough whisky.

There are barrels in the library.

Catching the last word, Jack disappeared. Campaspe permitted her mind to wander while Isabel chattered. From the ball-room the strains of the Limehouse Blues drifted down. Campaspe recognized the band as Paul Whiteman's. Florizel bubbled on—how did he find out so much?

It's her first novel. Have you read it? Well, it's as rotten as you'd expect. Agarista sent it to a publisher who owned a dog and the dog chewed up the manuscript before anybody had a chance to look it over. The publisher was forced to write her, of course, that he would accept her beautiful prose. Naturally, the story was too good to keep, and later it leaked out. Now she says that when she has written another masterpiece, she will urge