A middle-aged-looking man interrupts. "What is it, sir?" asks Madge. "Anything in rings? What kind?" "Oh, just plain rings," says the man with a great show of indifference, while his eyes ferret among the trinkets on the counter. And then, very calmly: "Oh, these will do, I guess." Two wedding rings, and he spent twenty cents. Madge follows him with her eyes. "That's it," she whispers, "usually the men buy two. One for themselves and one for the girl. Or if it's the girl that's buying them it's one for herself and one for her girl chum who's going with her and the two fellas on the party. Say, take it from me, these rings don't ever hear no wedding marches." * * * * * Back into the gloomy street again. A plot in our head, but who's the villain and who's the heroine and the hero? An easy answer to that. The crowd here--sad faced, tired-walking, bundle-laden. The crowd continually dissolving amid street cars and autos is the villain. A crowd of shoppers buying slippers for uncle and shawls for mother and mufflers for brother and some bars of soap for the bathroom. Buying everything and anything that fill the fan-shaped buildings with their glinting windows. Buying carpet sweepers and window curtains and linoleum. Pizzicato, pianissimo, professor--little-girl gigglers and hard-faced dock wallopers and slick-haired lounge lizards and broken-hearted ones--twenty a day they sidle up to Madge's counter, where the love me, love me songs razz the heavy air, and shoot a dime for a wedding ring. WHERE THE "BLUES" SOUND "That St. Louis woman Wid her diahmond rings, Pulls mah man 'round By her apron strings--" A voice screeches above the boom and hurrah of the black and white 35th Street cabaret. The round tables rock. Waiters careen. Balanced trays float at crazy angles through the tobacco smoke. Hats flash. Firecracker voices explode. A guffaw dances across a smear of faces. Congo gleams, college boy pallors, the smiles of black and white men and women interlace. A spotlight shoots its long hypotenuse upon the floor. In its drifting oval the entertainer, her shoulders back, her elbows out, her fists clenched and her body twisting into slow patterns, bawls in a terrifying soprano-- "If it waren't foh her powdah And her stohe bought hair. The man Ah love Would not have gone nowhere--" Listen for the tom-tom behind the hurrah. Watch for the torches of Kypris and Corinth behind the glare of the tungstens. This is the immemorial bacchanal lurching through the kaleidoscope of the centuries. Pan with a bootlegger's grin and a checked suit. Dionysius with a saxophone to his lips. And the dance of Paphos called now the shimmie.