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 not altogether clean, though the smoky shadows lay so thickly everywhere that one could not be sure. There had been a rather pathetic attempt at decoration. Loops of cheesecloth, colored crepe paper bonnets over the lights—things like that. The dance floor had a fence around it, and an orchestra of negroes wearing dinner coats played in the center. Outside the fence there were tables covered with squares of coarse stained linen, and surrounded by weirdly ill-matched couples. Black and tan. Black and white. White and tan. . . . There was something furtive about the place; a sense of wrong-doing. You breathed it in with the atmosphere. You read it in the shifting eyes. It was, in fact, what brought you there and made you stay.

They took a table close to the railing. They were quite uproarious already, and in order that they might continue to be so they ordered drinks from a dark-skinned waitress who put her arms across the shoulders of the nearest two boys as she listened. . . . Jock hoped she would hurry with the drinks. The place filled him with aversion and loathing, and he wanted liquor with which to overcome this feeling before his companions should detect it and begin to "kid" him. He was now, as always, eager to seem to enjoy the things that they enjoyed,—to be a good fellow, no matter what secret shivers of distaste it cost him.

He looked about him, glancing quickly from one table to the next. . . if you let your eyes rest long on any one spot in a place like this you acquired entangling alliances. After a moment he gave a barely perceptible jump and then almost, not quite, cried out.

Brad Hathaway! Sitting alone at a table in a