The disgusted girl jeered at him in discordant slang phrases that added still another note to the polyglot noises of the street.
"Isn't he the cute little dreamer! For the luv o' Mike, Mac, change your brand. Do you mean to tell me that you expect to strike gold in that place? To blazes with your fairy stories and your phoney islands."
"It's like Heaven compared to Atlantic City, that apogee of your ballyhoo soul, Carlotta, so" (he descended) "don't get cold feet now.".
"Cold feet—huh—they blister and burn and smart—ouch! and never a corner drug store where a soul can get footease of any sort."
The gambler left them to their wrangling, and they sauntered slowly up the street until they came to an ancient and crazily-leaning doorway, built of stone, in the Sixteenth Century Spanish style of the early discoverers.
"This is the place," he said, "hope the rest are there. Believe me, Desdemona, it's worth a gold-chest like Rockerfeller's—wrangling that crew."
They turned from the street and all its noises and smells and colours into the courtyard of "The Café of Many Tongues." The proprietor, with some shadow of truth, at least as far as the period was concerned, always claimed that the stone building whose narrow windows commanded the courtyard had been built by Ponce de Leon himself. But there was visible no healing water such as the wearied Castilian sought, only the signs of old age and decrepitude, and in the shadow of the walls little puddles like those in the
