lash of the wind, growing redder and redder until it almost matched the bits of hair which peeped from underneath the close-fitting toque of vivid green. I do wish, she thought as she abandoned her thoughts of the morning in the joy of the battle with the stinging wind, I had been so constituted that I did not feel things so much, that I did not have the capacity for suffering as I do. But then, I wouldn’t be able to enjoy things so much, so I suppose it all balances up in the end. …
For two and a half hours Mimi and Bert sat through a show in which slightly aged jokes and chorus girls suffering from the same malady sought to keep alive a tenuous plot. Bert started humming an improvised verse to an old tune which sounded like “Just another good show gone wrong,” until a purposeful-looking woman in front of them turned and glared at him through an imposing pair of lorgnettes. Whereupon he subsided into abashed silence. But not for long, for he soon was whispering to Mimi that “the only good spots in the show are the dirty ones,” furnished as they were by a Jewish comedian in blackface. “If they’d only lower their voices a bit we could all take a nap and thus the evening wouldn’t be entirely wasted,” was Bert’s comment along towards the middle of the last act. And Mimi was thinking that this was just the sort of show Jimmie would choose and enjoy.
Outside, the snow had ceased falling. Hurrying crowds flowed towards the subway and elevated, pouring in seemingly endless floods from countless theatres.
“What next?” Bert asked as he sought to shelter her from the rushing throng.
“I’ll tell you—I want to see a Negro cabaret in Harlem. I’ve hinted to Jimmie but he had never offered to take me. Though he seems to know a lot about them himself—” she thought, leaving the last sentence unuttered.