Page:Glitter (1926).pdf/105

 some hilarious, giggling foolishly at nothing. Girls who sprang up when the music started and shook their shoulders and rolled their eyes and swayed, with their elbows bent and palms outward, to its rhythm. Unofficial performers, aping their sisters of the chorus and the cabaret. You could tell the ones who weren't drinking. Faint lines of distaste and fatigue sketched across their foreheads. . . . Winky Winters over there. With a terrific edge. Hair all ruffled, and shoulder bare where she'd broken a strap, and didn't give a hoot. All she could do to get around. . ..

Jock never acknowledged a notion so old-fashioned, but he really intensely disliked to see girls drink. Not for any ethical reason; merely because it offended his sense of the fitness of things. Raw poison down soft white throats. . . reek of stale whiskey on lips that should be sweet for kissing. . . . Even when he handed over his flask, as he was often called upon to do, and stood by while some pink-and-white maiden partook generously of its contents, a voice inside him cried, "No!" wildly, over and over. The thing seemed to him so inappropriate that it was almost sacrilege. . . like stumbling on a cuspidor in a dainty silken boudoir. . ..

Pondering this now, he felt a creeping nausea. So many girls drunk! Revolting, unlovely. Girls were put on earth for men to worship, and look up to, and adore. And you couldn't, in this generation. Idols with clay feet. Even when you shut your eyes you could still see them, moving unsteadily, mouthing the phrases of bar room loafers. . . "Set 'em up!" . . . "Awful thirst tonight". . . "Wet my whistle." You could fancy them being hideously sick, later.

Jock shook himself. "Snap out of it!" he muttered savagely. "Don't be a doggone prude! Those ideas