Page:Twilight Sleep (Grosset).pdf/97

RV 89 brick walls, fire escapes and back-yards. "Sham? Oh, of course. I had the real window blocked up. It looked out on that stupid old 'night-piece' of Brooklyn Bridge and the East River. Everybody who came here said: 'A Whistler nocturne!' and I got so bored. Besides, it was really there: and I hate things that are really where you think they are. They're as tiresome as truthful people. Everything in art should be false. Everything in life should be art. Ergo, everything in life should be false: complexions, teeth, hair, wives specially wives. Oh, Miss Manford, that you? Do come in. Mislaid Lita?"

"Isn't she here?"

"Is she?" He pivoted about on the company. When he was not dancing he looked, with his small snaky head and too square shoulders, like a cross between a Japanese waiter and a full-page advertisement for silk underwear. "Is Lita here? Any of you fellows got her dissembled about your persons? Now, then, out with her! Jossie Keiler, you're not Mrs. James Wyant disguised as a dryad, are you?" There was a general guffaw as Miss Jossie Keiler, the octoroon pianist, scrambled to her pudgy feet and assembled a series of sausage arms and bolster legs in a provocative pose. "Knew I'd get found out," she lisped.

A short man with a deceptively blond head, thick lips under a stubby blond moustache, and eyes like needles behind tortoiseshell-rimmed glasses, stood