My mind wasn’t on this sort of repartee, however; I was studying the girl. There was something vaguely familiar about her—but I couldn’t place her. Perhaps I hadn’t seen her before; perhaps much looking at the picture Pangburn had given me was responsible for my feeling of recognition. Pictures will do that.
Meanwhile, Joplin had said:
“Time to waste is one thing I ain’t got.”
And I had said:
“If you’d saved up all the time different judges have given you, you’d have plenty.”
I had seen the girl somewhere before. She was a slender girl in a glistening blue gown that exhibited a generous spread of front, back and arms that were worth showing. She had a mass of dark brown hair above an oval face of the color that pink ought to be. Her eyes were wide-set and of a grey shade that wasn’t altogether unlike the shadows on polished silver that the poet had compared them to.
I studied the girl, and she looked back at me with level eyes, and still I couldn’t place her. Kilcourse still sat dangling a leg from the table corner.
Joplin grew impatient.
“Will you stop gandering at the girl, and tell me what you want of me?” he growled.
The girl smiled then, a mocking smile that bared the edges of razor-sharp little animal teeth. And with the smile I knew her!
Her hair and skin had fooled me. The last time I had seen her—the only time I had seen her before—her face had been marble-white, and her hair