these girls who sought him; she felt them regarding her as a rival; she felt upon her the eyes of other men.
Lew held her by the hands, after the music stopped, and rushed her beside him up the stairs, pressing past couples seated on the steps; he plumped her down upon a couch on the balcony and himself close beside her.
A big radio adorned one of the corners below and, in the interval, some one turned it on to raucous jazz; but jazz, with a band in the room, was ordinary and a twist of the dial caught and intensified a speaking voice. The news crier, it was, with night announcements: In Europe, a prince was born. Somebody cheered; nearly everybody else laughed. The girl at the radio let it shout the news as long as it was amusing, but it turned to an earthquake in Japan; the men on the wreck in Lake Superior still in the same situation. The radio dial twisted to a sentimental song which a girl on the stairs caught and parodied to yells of applause. She had to sing it again. At the tom-tom beat of the drum, everybody scrambled up and piled to the dance-floor.
The girl who had sung the parody had cast off her partner and she tried to entrap Lew. She pushed Ellen aside and Ellen, flushing, resisted. At that, Lew clutched her and tremendously elated, he bore her to the dance. "That's the spunk; stick with me! . . . I'll stick with you!"
Spunk. For the moment, pushed aside, she had felt it; she had resisted; for the moment, she had won; but she danced in his arms, sick with her triumph. He backed her close to the radio horn which had shouted the song in
