Cigaretted

A cigaretted boy and two men with pipes had looked him over, an hour back.

In time they will join—it’s their anxious ambition—a bevy similar to that now waiting at the stage entrance of the “Alhambra” with their cigaretted “boys.”

One by one Gilmer Meriwether, the boyish camera man; “Reddy” Prince, the loquacious head of the animal farm; the chattering girls and the cigaretted boys; the camels; even the tiger, whom age had pushed into the movies—all resolved themselves into beings unsubstantial as sea wraiths—and were gone.

Mrs. Delafield had traveled up to town several times in this emergency, and had even accompanied Rhoda to the studio, where a young lady with bare legs and feet was dancing, with more concentration than spontaneity, before a cigaretted audience.

Until one afternoon, feeling utterly despondent, and sitting in the window seat of a swank café, in a thoroughfare just off the main square, listlessly watching the people going by – same faces, same umbrellas – it was raining and sleeting – and satiated with enough coffee till I felt like Brazil, and turning listlessly about every now and then to look at the cigaretted women with their cool lip-sticked mouths, boredly listening to their boring male escorts, or boredly inhaling and boredly expelling, smoke, I mean, or jingling their gold bracelets with charms attached on their thin sun-tanned wrists, with elbows on table and cig-holders at eye-level […]

They crane their cigaretted hands to their mouths in unison and share the same eerie glow of suffocated defeat.

Natsu gave her an inquisitive look, tapping his temple with a cigaretted hand […]

There's no sign of Caroline in the kitchen so I follow the music through into the sitting room, which is where I find her, tapping a cigaretted hand to the beat, curled up on the sofa with Sadie.