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 incline yours to his to hear him reply that he hasn't it but that he'll give you something in a corner.

The room beyond the screen is enormously large, and looks even larger because its walls are dusky-black and seem to mingle with the night in an infinitude of darkness. A ruby necklace of lights encircles these walls—ornamentally, not usefully. There is a great horseshoe packed tight with black lacquered tables bordered in red, and little black-and-red chairs, and people. . . and at the open end of the horseshoe Happy Hatton's Celebrated Syncopated Seven preside, in an elevated alcove draped in scarlet satin, like the boudoir of a courtesan. The dance floor is oval, painted black and red, and above it searchlights from opposite corners meet to play with a globe of tiny mirrors hung high in the center, and to win therefrom a thousand iridescences. Wisps of light spray down from this globe upon the dancers, and blobs of it drift over their faces like huge intangible snowflakes, making them look pretty—much prettier than they are.

Of course, there are crowds and crowds. There are ballroom crowds that smack of valets and French maids and show windows on Fifth Avenue. There are amusement-park crowds with sleazy dresses and gents' ready-to-wear suits and run-down heels and jaws in perpetual motion. There are baseball crowds, straw=hatted, shirt-sleeved, perspiring. There are football crowds, vast gay menageries of fur. There are movie crowds sticky with candy, pale with bad air; and hotel crowds, dark-clad and middle-aged and smug. But the roadhouse crowd is like no other in the world.

To begin with, it is bored. With itself, with its neighbor, with all things. It has lived hard and swiftly, the roadhouse crowd, and now it is burned out and bored; and so it cries for White Rock and cracked ice,