ts
music hunger on the 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. The music seems to satisfy a something within them. Faces
dull, eyes lusterless, 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 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 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 stuff, and
songs about wanting to go back to every place from Dixie to Duluth.
But now seems it's all these here flag wavers. Honestly, I'm so sick
of 'em I got a notion to enlist to get away from it."

Terry eyed him with withering briefness. "A little training wouldn't
ruin your figure."

She had never objected to Orville's embonpoint. But then, O