Winner Take All Part 8

"But no harm done," airily. "He has to depend on the old man for his bank-roll. I just thought I'd tip you off."

She didn't go again. She stopped wanting to go anywhere, even to the movies, for quite a while. And then, just at eleven one night, while Felicity was before the mirror preparing to go to work and wondering where Cecille could be, the latter came quietly in. Felicity hardly marked her entrance until she dropped suddenly into a chair and began to laugh. It was the laugh which made Felicity turn so sharply. She had had experience with that shrill note in women's voices and knew what it could mean. Such breakdowns were ugly to handle.

She flung sharply round.

"What's tickling you?" she barked harshly. "Shoot! Let's have it.

Cut that, now!"

It stayed the slighter girl's hysteria.

"I've been--I've been to a dance," she gurgled.

Felicity gave her no foolish respite.

"Well, I don't get it," she rapped on. "Maybe I'm English. Where's the joke?"

"A--a dance over at the Central Palace, given for Worthy Working Girls--"

"That's funnier! But go ahead. Snap into it! Don't let it drag--don't let it drag--"

It seemed a potent cure.

"I went because I saw in the paper that Mrs. Schuyler Driggs was going to be among the patronesses to receive."

The hysterical giggle was gone from Cecille's voice. She shut tight her teeth and raised her chin. Felicity felt that it was safe now to remain silent. And she was right, partly right. She only failed to realize that Cecille was all too calm.

"I'm sorry, Felicity," the latter apologized meekly. "But I couldn't help it. I thought I'd laugh and cry and scream, right on the street, before I could get here. But I held on. Shall I finish?"

"Mrs. Schuyler Driggs has just made her entrance--"

"Yes. She was in the shop this morning." The recital seemed simple and orderly now. "I helped to fit her. I usually do. She's never very cordial, but this morning she was--oh, she was a beast! She nagged and nagged and nagged, until I got nervous. I couldn't help it.

I got worse and worse, until I stuck a pin into her. Not just a scratch." The gurgle threatened. "But deep--deep!"

"If you go off again," promised Felicity, "I'll dump that pitcher of water over you."

"I won't. I stuck the pin into her, and she--she grunted. And then--I never saw anyone grow so furious. She turned purple. I'm not sure that she didn't strike at me.

"'You did that on purpose,' she grated at me. Grated, that's the only word that describes it. 'You fool! You d.a.m.ned clumsy little fool!'"

Felicity waited until it was evident that she would have to speak.

"Well?" she asked then in a voice grown hard. "What did _you_ say?

What was the snappy come-back?"

"I couldn't think of anything to say, not just then--"

"Folks like you usually can't," said Felicity drily. "They think of a knock-out a half an hour too late. But not me. Language comes easy to me in a spot like that, language that I can't use regular without getting pinched, and I'm generous with it."

"I was a little more than a half hour late in having my say," Cecille admitted. "But I had it. I saw the announcement of the dance in the afternoon paper and her name, and I decided to go. I don't know why; that is, I didn't--not until she recognized me. Then I knew! She was shaking hands with me and telling me to have a good time. She was just pa.s.sing me on to the next in line, when she blinked at me, like that--she's fat--and stopped me.

"'Haven't I seen you somewhere before, my dear?' she asked. 'You seem somehow very familiar.'

"Then I knew why I'd come. And I let her have it!

"'You have,' I was just as throaty as she was. 'And I should be,'--meaning familiar. 'At ten-thirty o'clock this morning when I stuck a pin into you, fitting that gown you have on, you cursed me. If I remember accurately you called me a d.a.m.ned clumsy little fool.'"

"--seven--eight--nine--ten!" chanted Felicity joyously. "And _out_!

What did she do?"

And then, quite without any warning at all, came the break. It was like the shattering of brittle gla.s.s.

Cecille rocked to crazy mirth.

"She had them put me out!" she shouted. "She called the matron and had her put me out! She said the language I'd used before her was positively vicious. She said I'd--contaminate--those--worthy--working girls!"

And it took Felicity almost three-quarters of an hour to bring her round. In one brief interval of calm she managed to slip to the telephone and call a taxi. The rest of the time she spent on her knees beside the girl in the chair crooning softly. And she never knew that most of the words she set to her soothing, extemporaneous tune would have contaminated anybody, most of all Mrs. Schuyler Driggs herself.

At eleven-thirty, when Cecille was crying comfortably, she rose. And seeing that her work was well done, she became brisk.

"I'll get a bawling out from Fiegenspann," she said, and ran to a window. "Thank G.o.d, that taxi's here. And now you'd better get to bed. Maybe hereafter you'll know better than to mix it with somebody outa your cla.s.s. You oughta known in the first place that perfect ladies have got it all over girls like us, before we start. They've got everything fixed, the judges and the referee, before you step into the ring."

She ran out--and flashed back.

"Don't get me wrong, Cele." For one reason or another she hurried it.

"I ain't got time to explain just what I meant to say, but there's one thing I didn't mean. Don't get me wrong. If you ain't a lady, then I'm the Prince of Wales."

That was the second time Cecille heard it.

"A girl like us."

After a time her sobs subsided until they were no more than long, unsteady breaths. But she stayed at the window, staring down into the street. Once she dug the knuckles of one fist into her eyes and wistfully shook her head.

"I wonder," she whispered. "I wonder."

CHAPTER V

CHAMPION! CHAMPION!

Perry Blair, champion lightweight of the world, stood on the corner of Broadway and Forty-fourth Street, deep in contemplation of a quaint phase of our present-day democracy.

It was a fertile spot for such moralizing, albeit somewhat exposed for one attempting philosophy in a fall-weight overcoat. For nowhere in all this world could one hope to come upon a crowd better schooled in the rules of hero-wors.h.i.+p, American-style, than this eleventh-hour mob which was pouring like tide-rips from side-street theaters into the city's main thoroughfare.

Much has been written, of a distinctly pathetic flavor, concerning the case of a king without a throne. From days immemorial such hapless figures have been somehow invested by historians with a melancholy glamour; and yet this appears to be true only of those royal individuals who came by their thrones in the easiest way--that of inheritance. The kings of high endeavor who have won to the pinnacle by force of their own stoutness of heart--in other words the popular idols of a fickle public, who have scarce begun to get acquainted with the dizzy uncertainty of their pedestals before the pedestal be rudely removed from beneath them--rarely find the world inclined to melancholy interest in their plight. Ridicule is the commonest manifestation of any interest whatsoever, ridicule and an unfathomable contempt.

For some time Perry Blair had been finding this hard to understand.