Their heavily rouged and powdered faces were drawn with fatigue; their eyes like burned holes in once-gay blankets. Sally had watched them dance, enviously, between her own performances, had heard the barker ballyhooing them as: “Bybee’s Follies Girls, straight from Broadway and on their way back to join their pals in Ziegfeld’s Follies.” Now, weary unto death after eighteen performances, the “Follies” girls shuffled on aching feet to their cots and seated themselves with groans and dispirited curses, paying not the faintest attention to the tense tableau presented by Nita, the “Hula” dancer, and the girl they knew as “Princess Lalla.” Sally’s frightened eyes fluttered from one to another of that bedraggled, pathetic quartet, but she might as well have appealed to the gaudily painted banners that fluttered over the deserted booths outside. “What do you want, Nita?” she whispered, moistening her dry lips and twisting her little brown-painted hands together. “I’ll tell you fast enough!” Nita snarled, thrusting her face close to Sally’s. “I want you to give that sheik of yours the gate—get me? Ditch him, shake him, and I don’t mean maybe!” For the third time that day Sally was having David Nash, the only friend she had ever made outside the orphanage, flung into her face as a sweetheart or worse. Winfield Bybee’s casual words to his wife—“Can’t you see she’s clear gone on that Dave chap of hers?”—had made her heart beat fast with a queer, suffocating kind of pleasure, a pleasure she had never before experienced in her life. Those words had somehow initiated her into young ladyhood, fraught with strange, lovely, privileges, among them the right to be “clear gone” on a man—a man like David! The midget’s “your David” and “Of course you’re in love with him, and he’s crazy about you—a blind person could see that,” had sent her heart soaring to heaven, like a toy balloon accidentally released from a child’s clutch. But Nita’s “that sheik of yours,” Nita’s venomously spat command, “give him the gate, ditch him, shake him,” aroused in her a sudden blind fury, a fury as intense as Nita’s. “I’ll do no such thing! David’s mine, as long as he wants to be! You have no right to dictate to me!” “Is that so?” Nita straightened, hands digging into her hips, a toss of her ragged, badly curled blond head emphasizing her sarcasm. “Is that so? Maybe you’ll think I had some right when the cops tap you on the shoulder tomorrow! Too bad you and your David can’t share a suite in the county jail together!” “You’d—you’d do that—to David, too?” Sally whispered over cold lips. “I thought that’d get under your skin,” Nita laughed harshly. Then, as though the interview was successfully concluded, from her standpoint, the red-painted nails of her claw-like hands began to pick at the fastening of her grass skirt. Sally was turning away blindly, feeling like a small, trapped animal, when a tiny, shrill voice came from the midget’s cot: