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Updated: May 29, 2025
Marvin, to snub my pet musician my very newest pet musician," Mrs. Courtelyou rebuked him, as he entered. "I didn't mean it. I was waiting for why, my car went to pieces," he explained. "Is Pauline here?" "Here? She is the only person present. Baskinelli hasn't spoken a word to any one else. He won't play anything unless she suggests the subject. I am glad Mr. Owen is here to protect her."
"And she left me waiting at home for half an hour. It's outrageous." Harry strode across the floor just as the music ceased, and Baskinelli arose, bowing to the applause of his feminine admirers. "May I ask the honor to show to you Madame Courtelyou's portrait of myself? It is called 'The Glorification of Imbecility," he said as he proffered his arm to Pauline.
By the slightest movement imaginable, by the least uplift of his black brows, Owen answered. For the first time Baskinelli knew that the lovely quarry he pursued had a protector and no mean, no weak protector. But the arrival of the repast quickly covered the general embarrassment.
Voices sounded from the end of a little rose-rimmed alley. They were the voices of Harry and Lucille. Baskinelli was at her side again. "If I have said anything done anything to offend," he said, with affected contrition, "you will let me make my lowliest apologies, won't you?" Pauline hardly heard him. She was intently listening to the low pitched voices.
From her no mask of music, no glamour of others' admiration could hide the predatory obsequiousness of Baskinelli. She was not in the least interested in Baskinelli. She had loathed him from the moment when she had looked down on his little oily curls. But if Baskinelli had been Beelzebub he would have enjoyed the favor of Pauline that evening at least, after Harry had arrived.
It was opened by a venerable Chinaman in the flowing robes of a priest. He looked at them doubtfully. Baskinelli spoke three words that his companions did not hear. The priest vanished. Quickly the door was reopened and they stepped into the dim, smoky, stifling presence of the joss. The choking scent of the punk always at the folded feet of the idol was almost suffocating.
Baskinelli guided her back to the little door behind the screen the door from which the Chinamen had entered. Baskinelli drew aside the curtain. "There that is one form of adventure." Pauline looked through the curtain. A suffocating, narcotic odor came to her. What she saw was stifling not only to the senses but to the soul. She turned away. "Polly!"
A dim light flared behind the door and a Chinaman in American dress admitted them. "I am beginning to be really bored," said Pauline. "Wait; give the wicked a chance," said Baskinelli. They climbed three flights of dingy, narrow stairs, lighted with flaring gas jets. "Wonderful," jeered Pauline. "Not even a secret passage or a subterranean den!"
The machines drew up in Chatham Square, and the little procession that moved across to Doyers street dainty slippers on blackened cobblestones, light laughter tinkling under the thunder of the "L," human brightness brushing past the human shadows from the midnight dens made contrasts picturesque as a pageant in a catacomb. Pauline, on the arm of the chattering Baskinelli, led the way.
Save for its greater size and more splendid accoutrement, it was little different from the other. But it was walled, in its back alley seclusion, deep behind the outer fronts of Mott street, by a secrecy almost sincerely sacred. The motor cars remained far behind across the square as Baskinelli led the party through the dismal streets and stopped before a dark doorway.
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