“True,” said Jim, and met Joy’s eyes for a moment as he helped her descend. Jerry had joined the two boys, and Joy and Jim brought up the rear.
“It’s just that if you saw anyone you knew here, they’d wonder what you were doing in a place like this,” Jim said suddenly.
“They’d be here, too,” she retorted, “And although I may not have been to this particular place, the first of the summer I thought I took in every road house there was. Goodness knows that I long ago stopped worrying about appearances!”
This was the sort of speech that would have made Grant’s hair rise, she reflected, the minute she spoke; Grant would have thrown back some icy remark that would only have goaded her on. But Jim looked down at her without speaking, and something in his keen eyes made her feel very wriggly.
They entered the Toast and Jam. A low-ceilinged white hallway through which they looked in to a long, cozily gotten-up dining-room, with tables thrust along the sides. A colored orchestra at one end with a negro bawling out the words of the selection, and a piebald mass of dancers, exercise of contact whipping their blood higher and higher, the heat from the low-studded room growing with motion, so that they had to cling but stickily; but they clung. An assortment of all ages, having a preponderance of older men with more or less younger women whose general get-ups were equivocal.
“Do you remember your waiter? And find whoever it was who requested you to leave last night,” said Jim to Crawf, who slid into the dining room. Jerry streaked after him, her fan waving in determination, and Jim followed, with a request that Dum-Dum stay with Joy.
They waited in a silence that grew so appalling, with nothing to watch but the shivering of the dancers to the syncopated shriek of the orchestra, that Joy finally said in a tone as nearly ferocious as she could make it: “Do they call you Dum-Dum after the bullet or because you’re just plain _dumb_?” At his amazement, she hurled on; “It must be because you’re dumb—otherwise I don’t understand—how you could have been so careless—of a nice girl!”
He opened his mouth and closed it. His silence had suddenly changed colour. It was almost as if he had; and she read it as easily as if he had spoken. They were not so—careful—with Sarah as they might have been with “nice” girls. Jerry had diagnosed it—the key of their relationship with men was that the men acted as if they were among themselves. There had been just that careless oblivion, that utter lack of the protective instinct toward Sarah; and the idea of it was so horribly perverted that she gave a little shiver.