Tempest looked gravely up at his friend. “What did you have for dinner?”
Suspiciously, Silverstairs considered him.
“Why do you ask?”
“You are so expansive and brilliant.”
On the stage, the drama continued, poignantly, beatifically, in a unison of violins and voices that was interrupted at last by the usual stir in the stalls and boxes, by the haste to be going, to be elsewhere, and a defile began; a procession of silken robes, gorgeous cloaks, jeweled headgear, black coats, white ties; a procession that presently filled the subscribers’ rotunda, from which, at sight of it, grooms fled, then hurried back, touching their hats, eager and zealous.
Between the columns groups loitered, regarding each other with indulgence, with indifference, at times with a loftiness that put isolating zones about them; and women assumed that attitude which women alone can assume, that attitude of being not only apart from the crowd, but of being unaware of the crowd’s existence.
In the centre, Mme. Orlonna, an Italian princess, with a slight moustache and an ancestry that extended to the super-Neronian days of Heliogabalus, stood, laughing and talking, lisping Bonthoirs to everybody.
Another princess, a Russian, Mme. Zubaroff, with a young girl at her side, and an escort of blond giants, passed, inclining her head to the left, to the right, bowing with a grace mechanical, but sovereign.
Beyond, Leilah appeared, d’Arcy on one side, Barouffski on the other. Her face, ordinarily pale, was flushed, and her manner, usually subdued, was animated. She was laughing, not loudly, but noticeably.
Violet, accompanied by Tempest and Silverstairs, approached. As the men, after saluting the women, greeted each other, Violet tapped Leilah with her fan.
“My dear, I have a bone to pick with you.”
Leilah, with a levity that was rare with her, interrupted:
“It is just for that we are going to supper. How will you have it, grilled or deviled?”
“Her ladyship’s carriage is at the door,” a groom announced, in English.
Another added, in French: “The motor of madame la comtesse is advanced.”
“Yes,” Violet retorted. “But my bone belongs to a different kettle of fish. Now, you come with me.” With a smile, she turned to the others. “We will go in the brougham, and you take the motor.”
Stooping, she lifted her train, and the two women, accompanied by the men, followed the groom to the carriage.
There, after seeing them in, Barouffski called:
“To Paillard’s, Chaussée d’Antin.”
XII
At the glass door, which a chasseur opened, Barouffski stopped, spoke to the man, gave him an order. As the others, conducted by a maître d’hôtel, approached a table, a fat woman in a pulpit charged them, before they were seated, with the use of the silver and the cloth.
Beyond, a band of Bohemians, costumed in crimson, were loosing, with nervous and dirty fingers, whirlwinds of notes. The atmosphere, filled with vibrations, fevered by the fury of the violins, dripped with the scent of flowers, with the bouquet of burgundies, the smell of champagne, the odour of tobacco and food.
At adjacent tables were demireps and foreigners, mondaines and clubmen, a sprinkle of the cream of the venal, the exotic and the ultra-chic, whom omnibuses and waiters, marshaled by maîtres d’hôtel, served with the same deference and zeal.
For the Barouffski party, these latter had turned two tables into one, at which Violet Silverstairs occupied one end, Leilah the other. Violet had Barouffski at her right, Tempest at her left, while Leilah had Silverstairs at her left and d’Arcy at her right, a disposition natural enough and otherwise fortuitous which placed Tempest next to d’Arcy, with Barouffski and Silverstairs opposite.
In the rising storm of the music, Leilah turned to d’Arcy. What she was saying the others could not hear and all, save Silverstairs, who was munching a hors d’oeuvre, addressed themselves to Violet.
Presently, in a lull of the gale, Tempest would have tried to talk to this woman who, in abandoning her Madonna air had now the merit of suggesting both the Chimera and the Sphinx, but something in her attitude to d’Arcy prevented. It was not, to employ a vulgarism, that she was making eyes at the man, but she was obviously permitting him to make eyes at her.
D’Arcy was seated, his arms on the table, talking in her face. His plate was empty. A chaudfroid had been served. He had refused it. A mousse had followed. He had refused that also. Over the glasses at his side he had put a hand. It seemed a pose of his not to eat or to drink that he might do nothing but talk.
Leilah herself had not eaten. But as soon as champagne was served she had drunk of it, she had drunk since and in her manner, in the way she held herself, in the inflection of her voice, there had entered a trace of the excessive which the mondaine avoids. It was this that had deterred Tempest. Moreover she had been laughing and that surprised Violet who, except a little earlier in the rotunda, never, since Leilah reached Paris, had seen her laugh before.
Now, her head drawn back, her eyes half closed, she was gratifying d’Arcy with that look with which a woman can appear not to listen merely but to drink the words, the appearance even, of the man by whom she is addressed. While perhaps flattering to him, it was
