"Doll, we sure understand each other, don't we, sweetness? Eh? Answer me, sweetness, don't we? Eh? Eh?" "Yes, Jimmie." Over the city bells tolled of Christmas. * * * * * The gentle Hestia of Christmas Eve snug beside her hearth, with little stockings dangling like a badly matched row of executed soldiers, the fire sinking into embers to facilitate the epic descent from the chimney, the breathing of dreaming children trembling for their to-morrow--this gentle Hestia of a thousand, thousand Christmas Eves was not on the pay-roll of Maxwell's thousand-dollar-a-week cabaret. A pandering management, with its finger ever on the thick wrist of its public, substituted for the little gray lady of tradition the glittering novelty of full-lipped bacchantes whose wreaths were grape, and mistletoe commingling with the grape. An electric fountain shot upward its iridescent spray, now green, now orange, now violet, and rained down again upon its own bosom and into a gilt basin shaped like a grotto with the sea weeping round it. And out of its foam, wraithlike, rose a marble Aphrodite, white limbed, bathed in light. On the topmost of a flight of marble steps a woman sang of love who had defiled it. At candle-shaded tables thick tongues wagged through thick aromas and over thick foods, and as the drama was born rhythmic out of the noisy dithyramb, so through these heavy discords rose the tink of Venetian goblets, thin and pure--the reedy music of grinning Pan blowing his pipes. Rose-colored light lay like a blush of pleasure over a shining table spread beside the coping of the fount. A captain bowed with easy recognition and drew out two chairs. A statue-like waiter, born but to obey and, obeying, sweat, bowed less easy recognition and bent his spine to the backaching, heartbreaking angle of servitude. And through the gleaming maze of tables, light-footed as if her blood were foaming, Mrs. Violet Smith, tossing the curling ribbon of a jest over one shoulder. Following her Mr. Jimmie Fitzgibbons, smiling. "Here, sit on this side of the table, Doll, so you can see the big show." "Gee!" "It's the best table in the room to see the staircase dancing." "Gee!" "Told you I was going to show you a classy time to-night, didn't I, Doll?" "Yeh, but--but I ain't dressed for a splash like this, Jimmie, I--I ain't." "Say, they know me round here, Doll. They know I'd fall for a pair of eyes like yourn, if you was doing time on a rock-pile and I had to bring you in stripes." "I'm--a--sight!" "If you wasn't such a little pepper-box I'd blow you to a feather or two." "Ain't no pepper-box!" "You used to be, Doll. Two years back there wasn't a girl behind the counter ever gimme the cold storage like you did. I liked your nerve, too, durned if I didn't!" "I--I only thought you was guyin'."