Or no, vice has lost its humanness. She's the symbol of new sin--the
unhuman, passionless whirligig of baby girls and baby boys through the
cabarets."
* * * * *
They came back from a dance and continued to sit. The din was still
mounting. Entertainers fighting against the racket. Music fighting against
the racket. Bored men and women finally achieving a bedlam and forgetting
themselves in the artifice of confusion.
The newspaper man looking at his young friend saw her taking it in. There
was something he had been trying to fathom about her during her breathless
chattering. She talked, danced, whirled, laughed, let loose giggling
cries. And yet her eyes, the part that the rouge pot or the bead stick
couldn't reach, seemed to grow deader and deader.
The jazz band let out the crash of a new melody. The voices of the crowd
rose in an "ah-ah-ah." Waiters were shoving fresh tables into the place,
squeezing fresh arrivals around them.
The flapper had paused in her breathless rigmarole of Johns and memories.
Leaning forward suddenly she cried into the newspaper man's ear above the
racket:
"Say this is a dumb place."
The newspaper man smiled.
"Ain't it, though?" she went on.
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