After the poor husband had been snatched from the platform by his furiously jealous wife and given a most undignified paddling with her hastily removed shoe--an "added attraction" which proved vastly entertaining to the carnival crowd but which caused a good many quarters to find their hasty way back into handbags and trouser pockets--Sally felt her failure so keenly that she leaned backward in an effort to be cautious.
"For God's sake, kid, snap out of it before the next show!" Gus pleaded, mopping his dripping brow with a huge purple-bordered white silk handkerchief. "I'm part owner of this tent, you know, and you're hittin' me where I live. Come on, 'at's a good girl! Forget it--whatever's eatin' on you! This ain't a half-bad world--not a-tall! What if that sheik of yours is trailin' Nita around? Reckon he's just after her grouch bag--"
"Her--grouch bag?" Sally seized upon the unfamiliar phrase in order to put off as long as possible full realization of the heart-stopping news he was giving her so casually.
"That's right. You're still a rube, ain't you? A grouch bag is a show business way of sayin' a performer's got a wad salted down to blow with or buy a chicken farm or, if it's a hard-on-the-eyes dame like Nita, to catch a man with. Nita's got a roll big enough to choke a boa constrictor. I seen her countin' it one night when she thought she was safe. She was, too. I wouldn't warm up to that Jane if she was the last broad in the world. Now, listen, kid, you have a good, hard cry in the dress tent before the next show and you'll feel like a new woman. That's me all over! Never tell a wren to turn off the faucet! Nothin' like a good cry. I ain't been married four times for nothin'."
Sally waited to hear no more. She rushed out of the Palace of Wonders, a frantic, fantastic little figure in purple satin trousers and gold-braided green jacket, her red-sandled feet spurning the grass-stubbled turf that divided the show tent from the dress tent. And because she was almost blinded with the tears which Gus, the barker, had sagely recommended, she collided with another figure in the "alley."
"Look where you're going, you little charity brat, you ----" And Nita's harsh, metallic voice added a word which Sally Ford had sometimes seen scrawled in chalk on the high board fence that divided the boys' playground from the girls' at the orphanage.
