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 Barney, with his swart, smiling face and his restless, unsmiling eyes. Barney's lady, a bosomy blonde who took whiskey straight and whose flow of tainted narrative seemed limitless. Charley Kaufman, press agent for what Barney always referred to as "my interests," lean and saturnine. Kittens Mitchell of the almondshaped eyes that flew to Jock like steel to magnet, who had but a moment since asked Yvonne how she ever "found" that unusual shade of hair, And the Kendricks, man and wife, who did a dancing act on the two-a-day and cordially hated each other.

It was eleven o'clock. At the stroke of twelve August Schultz's wee niece, clad airily in cheesecloth panties, would appear, representing the New Year. (That is to say, the management hoped she would appear; at rehearsals she had temperamentally balked, and kicked August Schultz in the shins.) She would it was hoped, plant her foot triumphantly upon the prostrate back of the trombone player, who, in a long hoary beard, would represent the Old Year now defunct. And among the spectators there would be an increase of din, if possible. And people would kiss one another, and cheer, and bawl felicitations, and whistle, and spit the confetti out of their mouths, and do all the things with which good Americans usher in another first of January.

Preparations for this great moment were even now apparent. Everybody was drinking preposterously—the American hypothesis being, of course, that the drunker one is the better one ushers. Everybody was achieving terms of the friendliest intimacy with everybody else. Convivial souls were roaming from table to table, getting in the way of the distracted waiters, pausing to introduce themselves and to exchange a pleasantry or two. Gentlemen with their ties untied and