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their hair in their eyes were singing sentimental ballads, heads together. Acquaintances of two minutes' standing were calling one another "ole Joe" and "my frien' Sam, here, he's from St. Louis, yup, big cloak-an'-suit man out there." Streamers were describing graceful parabolas through the air, lighting like lassos around white necks. Girls were laughing shrilly, swaying back and forth. Here you saw a sleeper, chin on chest. There an old man, clenching the arm of a pretty blase youngster so tightly that his fingers dented dimples in her skin. There a woman knobby with avoirdupois, weeping at she knew not what. There a girl trying to climb on to her table, breaking glass, upsetting dishes. There a sophomoric individual being assisted out by two companions, assuring them as he went that "S'all fun." There a whole party owlishly intent on making a spoon jump into a tumbler by means of another spoon . . .

At eleven-thirty Jock and Yvonne left Barney Blaine's table and vanished . . . to reënter a few minutes later through the little painted door and to walk to the middle of the dance floor through a storm of hammering and tooting and clapping that threatened never to subside. It did partially, however, and Jock played, kneeling on his right knee, balancing the banjo that had a pink light in it on the other, throwing back his shoulders and jiggling them a little to the time, as he always did. And Yvonne sang. Sang about mammies she was going back to, and daddies who were coming back to her, and two-time fellas, and brown-skin gals, and love, and longing. A few more women and two or three men wept, and everyone approved thunderously, and some invisible one shouted in a megaphone voice, "Nice warblin', baby!" . . . They took four encores, and sat down again at Barney Blaine's table, and pre-