he scraps vouchsafed it by Bernie Gottschalk's Music
House. Loose-lipped, slope-shouldered young men with bad complexions and
slender hands. Girls whose clothes are an unconscious satire on
present-day fashions. On their faces, as they listen to the music, is a
look of peace and dreaming. They stand about, smiling a wistful half
smile. It is much the same expression that steals over the face of a
smoker who has lighted his after-dinner cigar, or of a drug victim who
is being lulled by his opiate. The music seems to satisfy a something
within them. Faces dull, eyes lustreless, they listen in a sort of
trance.

Terry played on. She played as Terry Sheehan used to play. She played as
no music hack at Bernie Gottschalk's had ever played before. The crowd
swayed a little to the sound of it. Some kept time with little jerks of
the shoulder--the little hitching movement of the rag-time dancer whose
blood is filled with the fever of syncopation. Even the crowd flowing
down State Street must have caught the rhythm of it, for the room soon
filled.

At two o'clock the crowd began to thin. Business would be slack, now,
until five, when it would again pick up until closing time at six.

The fat vocalist put down his megaphone, wiped his forehead, and
regarded Terry with a warm blue eye. He had just finished singing "I've
Wandered Far from Dear Old Mother's Knee." (Bernie Gottschalk Inc.
Chicago. New York. You can't get bit with a Gottschalk hit. 15 cents
each.)

"Girlie," he said, emphatically, "You sure--can--play!" He came over to
her at the piano and put a stubby hand on her shoulder. "Yessir! Those
little fingers--"

Terry just turned her head to look down her nose at the moist hand
resting on her shoulder. "Those little fingers are going to meet your
face--suddenly--if you don't move on."

"Who gave you your job?" demanded the fat man.

"Nobody. I picked it myself. You can have it if you want it."

"Can't you take a joke?"

"Label yours."

As the crowd dwindled she played less feverishly, but there was nothing
slipshod about her performance. The chubby songster found time to
proffer brief explanations in asides. "They want the patriotic stuff. It
used to be all that Hawaiian dope, and Wild Irish Rose junk, and songs
about wanting to go back to every place from Dixie to Duluth. But now
seems it's all these here flag raisers. Honestly, I'm so sick of 'em I
got a notion to enlist to get away from it."

Terry eyed hi