laboratory beauty at the wardrobe woman whom she had appropriated as her maid, to the fury of her sisters on the bill, and rushed out of the room. A youth with a dinnercoat, a plump purse, and an isosceles profile, lounged against the door, awaiting an engagement with her, which he imagined to be "social," she "strictly business." She breezed past him with a "Fade away, fade away, Milt," whose forceful insolence vastly chagrined him, but which to an impersonal spectator would have been most engaging, even captivating. Then she ordered the majestic negro under the canopy to order a taxi, not a too common vehicle in that year.
One drew up at the curb. She entered and under her directions, most explicit and clean-cut—though a trifle impure—the driver cut across Broadway, down Forty-ninth Street, and through Sixth Avenue, imperiling pedestrians, and skidding across the rain-glimmering asphalt in a succession of "sashays" that reminded one of her own on the polished floor, a little earlier in the evening.
The jolly voyage came to an end on Forty- fourth Street. After a lively little dispute over the fare, she approached the house, a famous brownstone front, and gave the cryptic signal at the grilled doors. Before her flaming imperiousness the doorkeeper blinked and backed a step, then perforce waived his orders not to admit women. Convention and tradition did not restrain her any more than the doorkeeper—they were ever the least of her worries. In fact Carlotta had no inhibitions whatever, even about pork and the passover. Were she in need of a person, and were that particular person at the moment in a Turkish bath—men's day only—she
