What she saw was not
pretty. If the words sordid and bacchanalian had been part of Miss
Fink's vocabulary they would have risen to her lips then. The
crowd had gone. The great room contained not more than half a
dozen people. Confetti littered the floor. Here and there a
napkin, crushed and bedraggled into an unrecognizable ball, lay
under a table. From an overturned bottle the dregs were dripping
drearily. The air was stale, stifling, poisonous.
At a little table in the center of the room Henri's three were
still drinking. They were doing it in a dreadful and businesslike
way. There were two men and one woman. The faces of all three
were mahogany colored and expressionless. There was about them an
awful sort of stillness. Something in the sight seemed to sicken
Gussie Fink. It came to her that the wintry air outdoors must be
gloriously sweet, and cool, and clean in contrast to this. She was
about to turn away, with a last look at Heiny yawning behind his
hand, when suddenly the woman rose unsteadily to her feet,
balancing herself with her finger tips on the table. She raised
her head and stared across the room with dull, unseeing eyes, and
licked her lips with her tongue. Then she turned and walked half
a dozen paces, screamed once with horrible shrillness, and crashed
to the floor.
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