"Gertie, this is my girl friend, Stella, from the shoes, I brought. Y'know? I told you about her. Ed's bringing down a gentleman friend for her." Miss Gertie Cobb, so blond, so small, so titillating that she resembled nothing so much as one of those Dresden table-candelabra under a pink glass-fringed shade with the fringe always atinkle, laughed upward in a voice eons too old. "Make yourself right at home. At our house, it's what you don't see ask for. Skin-nay Flint, if you don't stop! Make him quit, Cora; he's been ticklin' me something awful with that little old feather duster he brought along. Whatta you think this is--Coney Island? E-e-e-e-e-e!" There ensued a scramble down the length of the room, Miss Cobb with her thin, bare little arms flung up over her head, Miss Kinealy tugging and then riding in high buffoonery over the bare floor, firmly secured to Mr. Flint's coattails. "Leggo!" "Quit--ouch--e-e-e-e-e! That's right; give it to him! Cora--go to it--e-e-e-e-e--" Lips lifted to belie a sinkage of heart, Miss Schump, left standing, backed finally, sinking down to one of the camp-chairs against the wall. The little glittering mustache had come out again, and, sitting there, her smile so insistently lifted, the pink pearls at her throat rose and fell. The ukulele was whanging again, and a couple or two, locked cheek to cheek, were undulating in a low-lidded kind of ecstasy. Finally, Cora Kinealy and Archie Sensenbrenner, rather uglily oblivious. A youth, frantic to outdistance a rival for the dancing-hand of Miss Gertie Cobb, stumbled across Miss Schump's carefully crossed ankles. "'Scuse," he said, without glancing back. "Certainly," said Miss Schump, through aching tonsils. There was an encore, the raucous-throated morning-glory taking up where the ukulele had left off. Miss Schump sat on, the smile drawn more and more resolutely across her face. Occasionally, to indicate a state of social ease, she caught an enforced yawn with her hand. After a while Mrs. Cobb entered, quietly, almost furtively, hands wrapped muff fashion in a checked apron, sitting down softly on the first of the camp-chairs near the door. She had the dough look of the comfortable and the uncorseted fat, her chin adding a scallop as, watching, her smile grew. "It's great to watch the young ones," she said, finally. Miss Schump moved gratefully, oh, so gratefully, two chairs over. "It sure is," she said, assuming an attitude of conversation. "Like I tell Gert, it makes me young again myself." "It sure does." "Give it to 'em in the house, I say, and it keeps 'em in off the street." "Your daughter is sure one pretty girl." "Gert's a good-enough girl, if I could keep her in. I tell 'er of all my young ones she's the prettiest and the sassiest. Law, how that girl can sass!" "Like my mother always says to me about sass, sass never gets a girl nowheres."