At twelve o’clock, five of near-Broadway’s best breed, in woolly anklets and wristlets and a great shaking of curls, execute the poodle-prance to half the encores of other days.  May Deland, whose ripple of hip and droop of eyelid are too subtle for censorship, walks through her hula-hula dance, much of her abandon abandoned.  A pair of apaches whirl for one hundred and twenty consecutive seconds to a great bang of cymbals and seventy-five dollars a week.  At shortly before one Miss Hanna de Long, who renders ballads at one-hour intervals, rose from her table and companion in the obscure rear of the room, to finish the evening and her cycle with “Darling, Keep the Grate-Fire Burning,” sung in a contralto calculated to file into no matter what din of midnight dining.

In something pink, silk, and conservatively V, she was a careful management’s last bland ingredient to an evening that might leave too Cayenne a sting to the tongue.

At still something before one she had finished, and, without encore, returned to her table.

“Gawd!” she said, and leaned her head on her hand.  “I better get me a job hollerin’ down a well!”

Her companion drained his stemless glass with a sharp jerking back of the head.  His was the short, stocky kind of assurance which seemed to say, “Greater securities hath no man than mine, which are gilt-edged.”  Obviously, Mr. Lew Kaminer clipped his coupons.

“Not so bad,” he said.  “The song ain’t dead; the crowd is.”

“Say, they can’t hurt my feelin’s.  I been a chaser-act ever since I hit the town.”

“Well, if I can sit and listen to a song in long skirts twelve runnin’ weeks, three or four nights every one of ’em, take it from me, there’s a whistle in it somewhere.”

“Just the same,” she said, pushing away her glass, “my future in this business is behind me.”

He regarded her, slumped slightly in his chair, celluloid toothpick dangling.  There was something square about his face, abetted by a parted-in-the-middle toupee of great craftsmanship, which revealed itself only in the jointure over the ears of its slightly lighter hair with the brown of his own.  There was a monogram of silk on his shirt-sleeve, of gold on his bill-folder, and of diamonds on the black band across the slight rotundity of his waistcoat.

“Never you mind, I’m for you, girl,” he said.

There was an undeniable taking-off of years in Miss de Long.  Even the very texture of her seemed younger and the skin massaged to a new creaminess, the high coiffure blonder, the eyes quicker to dart.

“Lay off, candy kid,” she said.  “You’re going to sugar.”

“Have another fizz,” he said, clicking his fingers for a waiter.

“Anything to please the bold, bad man,” she said.

“You’re a great un,” he said.  “Fellow never knows how to take you from one minute to the next.”

“You mean a girl never knows how to take you.”