"You make me
laugh. You make me laugh."
"That'll do," he said.
"Whoop la-la!"
"Now, you get noisy and watch me."
He turned in rather abruptly at a side door of the dark-red pile of
building which boasted the illuminated tower-clock and a jutting ell
with barred windows.
She drew back.
"No, you don't! Aw, no, you don't! Whatta you think I yam? Cora's! Tell
it to the poodles and the great Danes!"
He shoved her with scant ceremony beyond the heavy door. She entered in
one of the uncontrollable gales of laughter, the indoor heat immediately
inducing the dizziness.
"Whatta you think I yam? Tell it to the poodles and the great Danes!"
Thirty minutes later, in a court-room as smeared of atmosphere as a
dirty window, a bridge officer, reading from a slip of paper, singsonged
to the sergeant-at-arms:
"Stella Schump. Officer Charles Costello."
How much more daringly than my poor pen would venture, did life, all of
a backhanded, flying leap of who knows what centrifugal force, transcend
for Stella Schump the vague boundaries of the probable.
The milky-fleshed, not highly sensitized, pinkly clean creature of an
innocence born mostly of ignorance and slow perceptions, who that
morning had risen sweet from eleven hours of unrestless sleep beside a
mother whose bed she had never missed to share, suddenly here in
slatternliness! A draggled night bird caught in the aviary of night
court, lips a deep vermilion scar of rouge, hair out of scallop and
dragging at the pins, the too ready laugh dashing itself against what
must be owned a hiccough.
Pages:
104
105
106
107
108
109
110
111
112
113
114
115
116
117
118
119
120
121
122
123
124
125
126
127
128