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From behind a pillar, a hen pheasant's tail in her hat raising her above the crowd, her shoulders rain-spotted and a dripping umbrella held well away from her, emerged Gertie Dobriner, a reproach in her expression, but meeting him with a pantomime of laughs and sallies. A tangle of passengers closed them in. A train wild with speed tore into the station, grinding to a stop on shrieking wheels.
Miss Gertie Dobriner entered first and, holding wide the door between them, Alphonse Michelson at the front wheels, they tilted the white carriage up the narrow staircase, their whispers floating through the gloom. "Easy there, Phonzie!" "There!" "Watch out!" "Whew! that was a close shave!" "Here, let me unlock the door. 'Sh-h-h!" "Don't go, Gert.
"I I ain't so stuck on this place, madam, that I got to stand for your insinuations." "No, it ain't the place you're stuck on that keeps you here, Gert." They regarded each other through eyes banked with the red fires of anger, and beside the full-length mirror Miss Dobriner trembled as she stood. "You can think what you please, madam.
Miss Dobriner stooped forward, her eyes narrow as slits. "Seventy-five, spot down." Indecision vanished as rags before Abracadabra. "We make it a rule not to sell our samples, but " "That carriage has got to be delivered at my house to-night before ten." "Sir, that can't go out to-night. It's got to be packed special and sent over on a flat-top dray.
Gertie Dobriner cupped her chin in her palm and gazed out at the quiet street and the shuttered shops hurtling past. Twice the conductor touched her shoulder, his hand outstretched for fare. She sprang about, fumbling in her purse for a coin, but with difficulty, because through the hot blur of her tears she could only grope ineffectually.
In a south-bound car Gertie Dobriner found a seat well toward the front. Across the aisle a day laborer on a night debauch threw her a watery stare and a thick-tongued, thick-brogued remark. A char-woman with a newspaper bundle hugged under one arm dozed in the seat alongside, her head lolling from shoulder to shoulder. Raindrops had long since dried on the window-pane.
On the ground floor of a dim house in a dim street, which by the contrivance of its occupants had been converted from its original role of dark and sinister dining-room to wareroom for a dozen or more perambulators on high, rubber-tired wheels, Alphonse Michelson and Gertie Dobriner stood in conference with a dark-wrappered figure, her blue-checked apron wound muff fashion about her hands.
Across the room Madam Moores regarded them from beside the pile of sheeny silks, her fingers plucking nervously at the fabrics. "Hurry up over there, Phonzie. I told her the black lace was on the way." Miss Dobriner daubed at her red lips with a lacy fribble of handkerchief, her voice sotto behind it. "Don't let her pin you, Phonzie. Have a heart and take me to supper when I'm blue as indigo."
In a sotto voice and with a flow of red suffusing his face, Alphonse Michelson turned to Gertie Dobriner, his hand curved blinker fashion to inclose his words. "For Gawd's sake, cut the haggling, Gert. If this here white enamel is the carriage we want, let's take it and hike. I got to get home." Miss Dobriner drew up her back to a feline arch.
Miss Dobriner bared her teeth to a smile and closed her lips again before she spoke. "Good night madam." Then she went out, clicking the door behind her. Through the mauve-colored swinging-door and scarcely a clock-tick later entered Mr. Alphonse Michelson, spick, light-footed, slim. "Charley's left with the black lace, madam." It was as if Madam Moores suddenly threw off the husk of the day.
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