"I should worry! I was never out with him in a show in my life that he didn't ogle a hole in every queen he seen. Out in Spokane onct he--" "Western circuit--Western circuit--" They hurried down a curving, white-tile corridor, rows of doors with eye-like glass panes were lined up on each side, and the tick-tack of typewriters penetrating. Della's breath came heavier and faster, and a layer of vivid pink showed through the artificial red. "You wait out here a minute, Della. I wanna step in here, at the Bijou, and see if Louis Rafalsky is doin' anything this morning. Then we'll shoot up to the Empire--" "Sure--I--I'll wait, Ysobel." She leaned against the wall and placed her hand over the region of her lace yoke and heart, as if she would regulate their heaving. A flash of cerise plume, a jangle of chatelaine jewelry, and Ysobel disappeared behind one of the doors, her many-angled silhouette flashing against the far side of the ground glass. Della breathed in deep and gulped in her dry, hot throat; her fingers, the damp cold born of nervousness, curled in toward her warm palms. She daubed at her lips with a handkerchief. Simultaneously a door opposite her opened, and a short, bullet-headed figure in a light checked suit, and a diamond horseshoe scarf-pin that caught the points of light stepped out into the pale nimbus cast by the white signal-light of an up-going elevator. With a gasp that caught in her throat Della darted in her too narrow skirt across the corridor, reached out, and grasped the light-gray coat-sleeve. "Look," she cried, thrusting herself between him and the trellis-work of the elevator-shaft and throwing back her head so that her bare neck, soft as the breast feathers of a dove, rose and fell with a dove's agitated breathing, "Look--I'm here!" The short figure turned on his heel and looked up at her, his shoulder-line a full three inches below hers, and his small, predaceous eyes squinting far back into his head. "Gad--what?" "I--I'm here--sir--don't you remember--me--I'm here." He regarded her with the detailed appraisal of the expert, and his glance registered points in her favor. "Gad!" he repeated. "Don't--you remember--me--sir--don't--" "Not bad for a big girl--are you--eh?" "Don't you remember?" "Sure--you're the little girl I met out West--didn't I?--two seasons ago with--" "No--no--no! Don't you remember me now?" She tore her hat backward from its carefully adjusted tilt, so that it revealed the brassy gold of her hair, and took a step toward him. "_Now_ don't you remember?" "Sure--sure--you're the little girl from--sure I'd remember a big little girl like you anywhere." "You remember now? On the twenty-eight-hour accommodation out of St. Louis. We--I got on at Terre Haute and sat across from you while he--they made up the berth, and you said--"