e seemed to repent the nod, for she
flared up and snapped: "Oh, shut up, for Christ's sake, cancher? Give
any one the fair pip, you do. Ain't I answered enough damsilly questions
from ev'body without you? Oo's got a fag?"

I had, so I gave her one. She fumbled with it, trying to light it with a
match held about three inches from it. Finally, I lit it for her, and
she seemed to see me for the first time. She looked at me, at once
shiftily and sharply. Her eyes narrowed. Suspicion leaped into her face,
and she seemed to shrink into herself like a tortoise into its shell.
"Oo's 'e?" she demanded of my mate.

"'E's all right. Oner the boys. Chuck knows 'im."

Then the match burnt her fingers, and she swore weak explosive oaths,
filthier than any I have heard from a bookmaker. She lisped, and there
was a suggestion in her accent of East Prussia or Western Russia. Her
face was permanently reddened by alcohol. The skin was coarse, almost
scaly, and her whole person sagged abominably. She wore no corsets, but
her green frock was of an artful shade to match her brassy hair. Her hat
was new and jaunty and challenging.

"Tell you what," she said, turning from me, and seeming to wake up;
"tell you what I'd like to do to that old counsel. I'd like to----" And
here she poured forth a string of suggestions so disgusting that I
cannot even convey them by euphemism. Her mouth was a sewer. The air
about us stunk with her talk. When she had finished, my mate again
leaned across me, and asked in a hollow whisper, like the friction of
sand-paper--

"'Ere--Luba--tell us. Why d'you go back on Billie, eh?"

Luba made an expressive gesture with her fingers in his face, and that
was the only answer he received; for she suddenly noticed me again, and,
without another word, she dipped her hand to her bosom and pulled out a
naked knife of the bowie pattern and twisted it under my nose. With the
nervous instinct of the moment, I dodged back; but it followed me.

"No monkey-tricks with me, dear! See? Else you'll know what. See?"

I was turning to my friend, in an appeal for intervention, when, quite
as suddenly as the knife was drawn, it disappeared, for Luba
overbalanced because of the gin that was in her, and slipped from the
form. Between us, we picked her up, replaced her, and tucked the knife
into its sheath. Whereupon she at once got up, and said she was off. For
some reason she went through an obscure ritual of solemnly pulling my
ear