He leaned across the table and out of the hearing of the attendant waiter.  “Not if we understand each other, Doll.  You stick to me and you’ll wear diamonds.  Gad!  I bet if I had two more fillies like Violet I’d run Diamond Pat Cassidy’s string of favorites back to pasture, you little queenie, you!”

Her timid glance darted like the hither and thither of a wind-blown leaf.  “I ain’t much of a looker for a Broadway palace like you’ve brought me to, Jimmie.  Look at ’em, all dolled up over there.  Honest, Jimmie, I—­I feel ashamed.”

“Just you stick to me, peaches, and there ain’t one at that table that’s got on anything you can’t have twice over.  I know that gang—­the pink queen and all.  ‘Longside of you they look like stacks o’ bones tied up in a rag o’ satin.”

“Aw, Jimmie, look at ’em, so blond and all!”

“They’re a broken-winded bunch.  Look at them bottles on their table!  We’re going to have twice as many and only one color in our glasses, kiddo.  Yellow, the same yellow as your hair, the kinda yellow that’s mostly gold.  That’s the kind of bubble water we’re going to buy, kiddo!”

“Jimmie, such a spender!”

“That’s me!”

“It’s sure like the girls say—­the sky’s your limit.”

“Look, Doll, there’s the swellest little dancer in this town—­one swell little pal and a good sport.  Watch her, kiddo—­watch her do that staircase dance.  Ain’t she a lalapaloo!”

A buxom nymph of the grove, whose draperies floated from her like flesh-colored mist, spun to the wild passion of violins up the eight marble steps of the marble flight.  A spotlight turned the entire range of the spectrum upon her.  She was like a spinning tulip, her draperies folding her in a cup of sheerest petals, her limbs shining through.

“Classy, ain’t she, Doll?”

“Well, I guess!”

“Wanna meet her?  There ain’t none of ’em that ’ain’t sat at my table many a time.”

“I like it better with just you, Jimmie.”

“Sweetness, don’t you look at me like that or you’ll get me so mixed up I’ll go out and buy the Metropolitan Tower for your Christmas present.  Whatta you want for Christmas—­eh, Doll?”

“Aw, Jimmie, I don’t want nothing.  I ’ain’t got no right to take nothing from you!” She played with the rich, unpronounceable foods on her plate and took a swallow of golden liquid to wash down her fiery confusion.  “I—­’ain’t got no right.”

“When I get to likin’ a little girl there ain’t nothing she ’ain’t got a right to.”

“Aw, Jimmie, when you talk like that I feel so—­so—­”

“So what, Doll?”

“So—­so—­”

“Gowann, Doll.”

“Aw, I can’t say it.  You’ll think I’m fresh.”

But she regarded him with the nervous eyes of a gazelle and the red swam high up into her hair, and he drained his glass down to the bottom of its hollow stem and leaned his warming face closer.