They were gone again, and the dressing room seemed twice as still and vacant as before. A minute of grace, during which Mrs. Brady wiped the spilled powder away with a damp gray rag. Then the door jumped open again. Two evening gowns appeared and made for the dressing table in a bee line. Slim tubular gowns they were, one silver, one palest yellow. Yellow hair went with the silver gown, brown hair with the yellow. The silver-gowned, yellow-haired girl wore orchids on her shoulder, three of them, and a flashing bracelet on each fragile wrist. The other girl looked less prosperous; still, you would rather have looked at her. Both ignored Mrs. Brady’s cosmetic display as utterly as they ignored Mrs. Brady, producing full field equipment of their own. “Well,” said the girl with the orchids, rouging energetically, “how do you like him?” “Oh-h--all right.” “Meaning, ‘Not any,’ hmm? I suspected as much!” The girl with the orchids turned in her chair and scanned her companion’s profile with disapproval. “See here, Marilee,” she drawled, “are you going to be a damn fool _all_ your life?” “He’s fat,” said Marilee dreamily. “Fat, and--greasy, sort of. I mean, greasy in his mind. Don’t you know what I mean?” “I know _one_ thing,” declared the girl with orchids. “I know Who He Is! And if I were you, that’s all I’d need to know. _Under the circumstances._” The last three words, stressed meaningly, affected the girl called Marilee curiously. She grew grave. Her lips and lashes drooped. For some seconds she sat frowning a little, breaking a black-sheathed lipstick in two and fitting it together again. “She’s worse,” she said finally, low. “Worse?” Marilee nodded. “Well,” said the girl with orchids, “there you are. It’s the climate. She’ll never be anything _but_ worse, if she doesn’t get away. Out West, or somewhere.” “I know,” murmured Marilee. The other girl opened a tin of eye shadow. “Of course,” she said drily, “suit yourself. She’s not _my_ sister.” Marilee said nothing. Quiet she sat, breaking the lipstick, mending it, breaking it. “Oh, well,” she breathed finally, wearily, and straightened up. She propped her elbows on the plate-glass dressing-table top and leaned toward the mirror, and with the lipstick she began to make her coral-pink mouth very red and gay and reckless and alluring. * * * * * Nightly at one o’clock Vane and Moreno dance for the Club Français. They dance a tango, they dance a waltz; then, by way of encore, they do a Black Bottom, and a trick of their own called the Wheel. They dance for twenty, thirty minutes. And while they dance you do not leave your table--for this is what you came to see. Vane and Moreno. The New York thrill. The sole justification for the five-dollar couvert extorted by Billy Costello.