Jack sighed. “I suppose I’ll have to. But she’s worth it.”

Barry Washburn placed his hand on Baldwin’s arm, and leaning over to the others said in a low voice:

“Say, listen in on the next table.”

They sipped their drinks slowly with ears alert.

At the next table was a high yellow, a big boudoir man with lust in his eyes, loving up three brown-skinned women who were going after him in a big way.

“Ah sure want yo’ hot stuff. When yo’ goin’ to commit grand fo’ me?” said one of the girls.

“Hush up. No yaller gal goin’ to get me ’cept she’s got two cars or mo’. Less’n dat Ah ain’t enticed. Ah ain’t even toleratin’ yer.”

“That’s the way to handle women, Wayne,” muttered Colton, with a laugh.

Baldwin gulped down his high ball and ordered another round.

“These niggers are all alike. That kind of stuff is all they think about,” he caustically remarked to his friends.

Crowds began to flock into the Harlem Breakfast Club and by three o’clock the place had reached its highest pitch of excitement.

Hell. . . . The inferno of sexual passion had broken loose!

XVI ORGY

YES, hell had broken loose at the Harlem Breakfast Club! The colored band was playing with its soul in every note. It had to play at fever pitch to bring out the cry of passion and debauch.

The bodies of almost naked colored women, wriggling and squirming, moved about the dance floor; brown-skinned busts shook frenziedly, hips swayed, abdomens protruded. The music excited, irritated, inflamed the animal instincts.

Spotlights swept over a white and black checkerboard. At one table in a blinding calcium glare a society group had its eyes riveted on a black hula dancer, weaving sensuously up and down near the corner of their table. An elderly, ultra-fashionable woman in the party looked on scandalized and shocked, it being her first visit to Harlem. As her horror grew, the colored girl increased her contortions. The crowd laughed and cheered, which assured the black dancer that her efforts to shock were being appreciated.

At the edge of the dance floor, Wayne Baldwin had a reserved table. He and his three friends were drunk, and thoroughly enjoying the orgy around them.

Baldwin’s eyes fastened themselves on a gorgeous woman draped in white ermine. It was Babe Gordon. Ordinarily Baldwin would have glanced at her and said, “A beautiful woman”—and thought nothing more. But here in this particular setting she flashed out like a white diamond. Was she unescorted, he wondered. There was no one at her table. He was anxious to know who she was. He couldn’t help admiring her.

His friends called his attention back to another round of drinks. While he drank, the woman’s beauty burned in his eyes. She was a sublime creature. One swallow of liquor and he looked back at her table.