“Why, you’re crazy with the heat, girl!  I thought you and me was talking the same language.  I want to do the right thing by you.  Sure I do!  Anything in reason is yours for the askin’.  That’s what I been comin’ to.”

“Then, Lew, I want you to do by me like you’d want your sister done by.”

“I tell you you’re crazy.  You been hitting up too many fizzes lately.”

“I—­”

“You ain’t fool enough to think I’m what you’d call a free man?  I don’t bring my family matters down here to air ’em over with you girls.  You’re darn lucky that I like you well enough to—­well, that I like you as much as I do.  Come, now; tell you what I’m goin’ to do for you:  You name your idea of what you want in the way of—­”

“O God!  Why don’t I die?  I ain’t fit for nothing else!”

He cast a glance around their deserted edge of the room.  A waiter, painstakingly oblivious, stood two tables back.

“Wouldn’t I be better off out of it?  Why don’t I die?”

He was trembling down with a suppression of rage and concern for the rising gale in her voice.

“You can’t make a scene in public with me and get away with it.  If that’s your game, it won’t land you anywhere.  Stop it!  Stop it now and talk sense, or I’ll get up.  By God! if you get noisy, I’ll get up and leave you here with the whole place givin’ you the laugh.  You can’t throw a scare in me.”

But Miss de Long’s voice and tears had burst the dam of control.  There was an outburst that rose and broke on a wave of hysteria.

“Lemme die—­that’s all I ask!  What’s there in it for me?  What has there ever been?  Don’t do it, Lew!  Don’t—­don’t!”

It was then Mr. Kaminer pushed back his chair, flopped down his napkin, and rose, breathing heavily enough, but his face set in an exaggerated kind of quietude as he moved through the maze of tables, exchanged a check for his hat, and walked out.

For a stunned five minutes her tears, as it were, seared, she sat after him.

The waiter had withdrawn to the extreme left of the deserted edge of the room, talking behind his hand to two colleagues in servility, their faces listening and breaking into smiles.

Finally Miss de Long rose, moving through the zigzag paths of empty tables toward a deserted dressing-room.  In there she slid into black-velvet slippers and a dark-blue walking-skirt, pulled on over the pink silk, tucking it up around the waist so that it did not sag from beneath the hem, squirmed into a black-velvet jacket with a false dicky made to emulate a blouse-front, and a blue-velvet hat hung with a curtain-like purple face-veil.

As she went out the side, Keeley’s was closing its front doors.