Both hands on the table he half rose, reluctantly, still talking.  “I’ve got three other songs.  They make Gottschalk’s stuff look sick.  All I want’s a chance.  What I want you to do is accompaniment.  On the stage, see?  Grand piano.  And a swell set.  I haven’t quite made up my mind to it.  But a kind of an army camp room, see?  And maybe you dressed as Liberty.  Anyway, it’ll be new, and a knock-out.  If only we can get away with the voice thing.  Say, if Eddie Foy, all those years never had a—­”

The band opened with a terrifying clash of cymbal, and thump of drum.  “Back at the end of my first turn,” he said as he fled.  Terry followed his lithe, electric figure.  She turned to meet the heavy-lidded gaze of the woman seated opposite.  She relaxed, then, and sat back with a little sigh.  “Well!  If he talks that way to the managers I don’t see—­”

Ruby laughed a mirthless little laugh.  “Talk doesn’t get it over with the managers, honey.  You’ve got to deliver.”

“Well, but he’s—­that song is a good one.  I don’t say it’s as good as he thinks it is, but it’s good.”

“Yes,” admitted the woman, grudgingly, “it’s good.”

“Well, then?”

The woman beckoned a waiter; he nodded and vanished, and reappeared with a glass that was twin to the one she had just emptied.  “Does he look like he knew French?  Or could make a rhyme?”

“But didn’t he?  Doesn’t he?”

“The words were written by a little French girl who used to skate down here last winter, when the craze was on.  She was stuck on a Chicago kid who went over to fly for the French.”

“But the music?”

“There was a Russian girl who used to dance in the cabaret and she—­”

Terry’s head came up with a characteristic little jerk.  “I don’t believe it!”

“Better.”  She gazed at Terry with the drowsy look that was so different from the quick, clear glance of the Ruby Watson who used to dance so nimbly in the Old Bijou days.  “What’d you and your husband quarrel about, Terry?”

Terry was furious to feel herself flushing.  “Oh, nothing.  He just—­I—­it was—­Say, how did you know we’d quarrelled?”

And suddenly all the fat woman’s apathy dropped from her like a garment and some of the old sparkle and animation illumined her heavy face.  She pushed her glass aside and leaned forward on her folded arms, so that her face was close to Terry’s.

“Terry Sheehan, I know you’ve quarrelled, and I know just what it was about.  Oh, I don’t mean the very thing it was about; but the kind of thing.  I’m going to do something for you, Terry, that I wouldn’t take the trouble to do for most women.  But I guess I ain’t had all the softness knocked out of me yet, though it’s a wonder.  And I guess I remember too plain the decent kid you was in the old days.  What was the name of that little small-time house me and Jim used to play?  Bijou, that’s it; Bijou.”