head. It don't look natural to me and I knows it ain't natural a little bit later when Mr. Raynor sets down on the arm of her chair and throws his arm around her sort of offhand and sociable-like, and she up and tells him for Heaven's sake to be careful and not muss her up because she says she's only just that day spent forty dollars and four hours getting a permanent wave put in.

At that I says to myself, I says:

"Well, betwixt w'ites an' blacks we su'ttinly is mekin' the world safe fur them beauty doctors. Niggers down South spendin' all the money they kin rake an' scrape togither gittin' the kinkiness tuck out of they haids an' fashionable ladies up yere spendin' their'n gittin' it put in! It's a compliment to one race or the other, but jest w'ich I ain't purpared to say."

The other ladies is named Miss O'Brien and Miss DeWitt but it's kind of hard for me at first to remember which from which seeing that the rest of the party scarcely ever calls 'em anything except Pat and Bill-Lee. They is both mighty nice and friendly but they is exclusively different one from the other. Miss Pat she's got her hair chopped off short like a little boy's and she acts kind of like a boy does, too—free and easy and laughing a lot and smoking a cigarette so natural that it's like as if she must a-been born with one in her mouth and it lighted. And yet for all that, I seems to get the impression that way down underneath she's kind of tired of herself and everything around her.

But this here Miss DeWitt she is tall and slender and kind of quiet. She must a-been feeling poorly lately because her face is just dead-white and her lips is still bright red from the fever and when she sets down in a chair she just seems to kind of fall back into it, all limp-like. She ain't saying much with her mouth but she does a sight of talking with her eyes which is big and black and sort of lazy-like most of the time. She sure is decked up with jewelry like the Queen of Sheba, too. She's got big heavy necklaces round her neck and great long ear-rings in her ears and many bracelets on both her arms. She's even got two big bracelets clamped round one of her ankles, which I judges she didn't have room for 'em nowheres else and so put 'em there to keep from losing 'em; and when she moves the jewelry all jingles freely and advertises her. She walks with a kind of a limber swimming gait, soft and glideful; of course it ain't exactly like swimming and yet that's the only way I can designate what her walking puts me in mind of. She wears dead black clothes and that makes her paleness seem all the more so.

Right from the first jump I can see that Mr. Dallas is drawed to her powerful, and I thinks to myself that if he's fixing to favor this here languid lady with his attentions it proves he's got a changeable taste because she ain't nothing at all similar to Miss Henrietta Farrell, which she is the one that he's been courting these past few months down in Kentucky. In fact, she's most teetotally unsimilar.

This Mr. Bellows which came with Mr. Raynor he don't detain my attention much. If he wasn't there you wouldn't scarcely miss him; and when he is there you don't scarcely observe him. He makes me think of a neat haircut and nothing else. You just appreciate him being present and that's all. But I studies Mr. Raynor every chance I gets, the more especially because he's the one which is more or less responsible for us having come North. He's very cheering in his ways; laughing and whooping out loud at everything and poking fun and telling Mr. Dallas that he must be good friends with Mr. Bellows and the three ladies because they is all four of 'em his friends. But I takes note that when he laughs he don't laugh with his eyes but only with his mouth, and when he sort of smiles to himself, quiet-like, it puts me in mind of a man drawing a knife. I can't keep from having a kind of a feeling when I looks at him!

Well, they imbibes up all the cocktails that I has waiting for them and a batch more which I makes by request and then they packs up a couple of bottles—one Scotch and one Bourbon—to take along with 'em for to refresh themselves with at the road-house and off they puts. And the last thing I hears as they goes down the hall is Mr. Raynor still laughing from off the top of his palates and the sickly one, Miss DeWitt's necklaces and things all jingling like a road-gang. Mr. Dallas he calls back to me from the elevator that I needn't wait up for him because it is liable to be pretty late when he gets in. But it's a good thing I does wait up, dozing off and on between times, because when he arrives back, along about half past three in the morning, he certainly does need my assistance getting his clothes off of him. Not since Dryness come in has I seen a young white gentleman more thoroughly overtaken than what he is. And we got a-plenty vigorous drinkers down our way, too! And always did have!

So then I goes to bed myself and that's the end of our first day. And the following day, which it was yesterday, is the day I gets lost.

Which I will tell about that, next.

Chapter IV