Page:Manhattan Transfer (John Dos Passos, 1925).djvu/353

Rh She laughed. "Jojo it's lots of fun to see you again,"

"I havent finished my catechism yet deah I saw you in the oval diningroom the other day with a very distinguished looking man with sharp features and gray hair."

"That must have been George Baldwin. Why you knew him in the old days."

"Of course of course. How he has changed. A much more interesting looking man than he used to be I must say A very strange place for the wife of a bolshevik pacifist and I. W. W. agitator to be seen taking lunch, I must say.

"Jimps isnt exactly that. I kind of wish he were" She wrinkled up her nose. "I'm a little fed up too with all that sort of thing."

"I suspected it my dear." Cassia was flitting selfconsciously by.

"Oh do come and help me Jojo's teasing me terribly."

"Well I'll twy to sit down just for a second, I'm going to dance next Mr. Oglethorpe's going to wead his twanslation of the songs of Bilitis for me to dance to."

Ellen looked from one to the other; Oglethorpe crooked his eyebrows and nodded.

Then Ellen sat alone for a long while looking at the dancing and the chittering crowded room through a dim haze of boredom.

The record on the phonograph was Turkish. Hester Voorhees, a skinny woman with a mop of hennaed hair cut short at the level of her ears, came out holding a pot of drawling incense out in front of her preceded by two young men who unrolled a carpet as she came. She wore silk bloomers and a clinking metal girdle and brassieres. Everybody was clapping and saying, "How wonderful, how marvelous," when from another room came three tearing shrieks of a woman. Everybody jumped to his feet. A stout man in a derby hat appeared in the doorway. "All right little goils, right through into the back room. Men stay here."