“Poor little filly!  I was that surprised when I seen you was back in the store again!  There ain’t been a classy queen behind the counter since you left.”

“Aw, Jimmie, no wonder the girls say you got your race-horses beat for speed.”

“That’s me!”

Aisles thinned and the store relaxed into a bacchanalian chaos of trampled debris, merchandise strewn as if a flock of vultures had left their pickings—­a battlefield strewn with gewgaws and the tinsel of Christmastide, and reeking with foolish sweat.

“Button up there, Doll, and come on; it’s a swell night for Eskimos.”

Mr. Fitzgibbons folded over his own double-breasted coat, fitted his flat-brimmed derby hat on his well-oiled hair, drew a pair of gray suede gloves over his fingers, and hooked his slender cane to his arm.

“Ready, Doll?”

“The girls, Jimmie—­look at ’em rubbering and gabbling like ducks!  It—­it ain’t like I could do any good at home, it ain’t.”

“I’d be the first to ship you there if you could.  You know me, Doll!”

His words deadened her doubts like a soporific.  She glanced about for the moment at the Dionysian spectacle of the Mammoth Store ravished to chaos by the holiday delirium; at the weary stream of shoppers and workers bending into the storm as they reached the doors; at the swift cancan of snowflakes dancing whitely and swiftly without; at Mr. Jimmie Fitzgibbons standing attendant.  Then she smiled.

“Come on, Jimmie!”

“Come on yourself, Doll!”

Snow beat in their faces like shot as they emerged into the merry night.

She shivered in her thin coat.  “Gee! ain’t it cold!”

“Not so you can notice it.  Watch me, Doll!” He hailed a passing cab with a double flourish of cane and half lifted her in, his fingers closing tight over her arm.  “Little Doll, now I got you!  And we understand one another, don’t we, Doll?”

“Yes, Jimmie.”

She leaned back, quiescent, nor did his hold of her relax.  A fairy etching of snow whitened the windows and wind-shield, and behind their security he leaned closer until she could feel the breath of his smile.

“Doll, we sure understand each other, don’t we, sweetness?  Eh?  Answer me, sweetness, don’t we?  Eh?  Eh?”

“Yes, Jimmie.”

Over the city bells tolled of Christmas.

* * * * *

The gentle Hestia of Christmas Eve snug beside her hearth, with little stockings dangling like a badly matched row of executed soldiers, the fire sinking into embers to facilitate the epic descent from the chimney, the breathing of dreaming children trembling for their to-morrow—­this gentle Hestia of a thousand, thousand Christmas Eves was not on the pay-roll of Maxwell’s thousand-dollar-a-week cabaret.

A pandering management, with its finger ever on the thick wrist of its public, substituted for the little gray lady of tradition the glittering novelty of full-lipped bacchantes whose wreaths were grape, and mistletoe commingling with the grape.