At the end of the table, leaning on her elbows, was a woman with black frizzy hair cut short, that stuck out from her head in all directions. Her eyes were dark and her lips red with a faint swollen look. She looked with a certain defiance at the men who stood about the walls and sat at the table.
The men stared at her silently. A big man with red hair and a heavy jaw who sat next her kept edging up nearer. Someone knocked against the table making the bottles and liqueur glasses clustered in the center jingle.
“She ain't clean; she's got bobbed hair,” said the man next Fuselli.
Only one man understood it. His laugh rang hollowly in the silent room and stopped suddenly.
The woman looked attentively at the faces round her for a moment, shrugged her shoulders, and began straightening the ribbon on the hat she held on her lap.
“How the hell did she get here? I thought the M. P.'s ran them out of town the minute they got here,” said one man.
“You venay Paris?” said a boy with a soft voice who sat near her. He had blue eyes and a milky complexion, faintly tanned, that went strangely with the rough red and brown faces in the room.
“Oui; de Paris,” she said after a pause, glancing suddenly in the boy's face.
“She's a liar, I can tell you that,” said the red-haired man, who by this time had moved his chair very close to the woman's.
“You told him you came from Marseilles, and him you came from Lyon,” said the boy with the milky complexion, smiling genially. “Vraiment de ou venay vous?”
“I come from everywhere,” she said, and tossed the hair back from her face.
“A feller told me,” said Fuselli to Bill Grey, “that he'd talked to a girl like that who'd been to Turkey an' Egypt I bet that girl's seen some life.”
The woman jumped to her feet suddenly screaming with rage. The man with the red hair moved away sheepishly. Then he lifted his large dirty hands in the air.
Nobody laughed. The room was silent except for feet scraping occasionally on the floor.
She put her hat on and took a little box from the chain bag in her lap and began powdering her face, making faces into the mirror she held in the palm of her hand.
“Guess she thinks she's the Queen of the May,” said one man, getting to his feet. He leaned across the table and spat into the fireplace. “I'm going back to barracks.” He turned to the woman and shouted in a voice full of hatred, “Bon swar.”