on yourself, Doll!"

Snow beat in their faces like shot as they emerged into the merry night.

She shivered in her thin coat. "Gee! ain't it cold!"

"Not so you can notice it. Watch me, Doll!" He hailed a passing cab with
a double flourish of cane and half lifted her in, his fingers closing
tight over her arm. "Little Doll, now I got you! And we understand one
another, don't we, Doll?"

"Yes, Jimmie."

She leaned back, quiescent, nor did his hold of her relax. A fairy
etching of snow whitened the windows and wind-shield, and behind their
security he leaned closer until she could feel the breath of his smile.

"Doll, we sure understand each other, don't we, sweetness? Eh? Answer
me, sweetness, don't we? Eh? Eh?"

"Yes, Jimmie."

Over the city bells tolled of Christmas.

* * * * *

The gentle Hestia of Christmas Eve snug beside her hearth, with little
stockings dangling like a badly matched row of executed soldiers,
the fire sinking into embers to facilitate the epic descent from
the chimney, the breathing of dreaming children trembling for their
to-morrow--this gentle Hestia of a thousand, thousand Christmas Eves was
not on the pay-roll of Maxwell's thousand-dollar-a-week cabaret.

A pandering management, with its finger ever on the thick wrist of its
public, substituted for the little gray lady of tradition the glittering
novelty of full-lipped bacchantes whose wreaths were grape, and
mistletoe commingling with the grape.

An electric fountain shot upward its iridescent spray, now green, now
orange, now violet, and rained down again upon its own bosom and into a
gilt basin shaped like a grotto with the sea weeping round it. And out
of its foam, wraithlike, rose a marble Aphrodite, white limbed, bathed
in light.

On the topmost of a flight of marble steps a woman sang of love who had
defiled it. At candle-shaded tables thick tongues wagged through thick
aromas and over thick foods, and as the drama was born rhythmic out of
the noisy dithyramb, so through these heavy discords rose the tink of
Venetian goblets, thin and pure--the reedy music of grinning Pan blowing
his pipes.

Rose-colored light lay like a blush of pleasure over a shining table
spread beside the coping of the fount. A captain bowed with easy
recognition and drew out two chairs. A statue-like waiter, born but to
obey and, obeying, sweat, bowed less easy recognition and bent his spine
to the backaching, heartb