“Give me something to drink, dearie—I am dying of thirst,” she said, and she drew a chair to their table. Gerard de Montignac laughed brutally and would have driven her away, but Paul was quick to anticipate him. He had seen the woman flush under her paint when Gerard laughed.
“Of course,” he said at once. “What shall we all drink, Mademoiselle?”
She turned to him gratefully.
“If you will take my advice, the whiskey. The champagne—oh, never.”
“I can imagine it,” said Paul. “Chiefly sugar and sulphuric acid and mixed in the back yard,” and he laughed pleasantly to put the woman at her ease.
The one sure gain which had come to Paul from the destruction of his illusions was a hesitation in passing judgment upon people and estimating their values and characters. He had been so utterly mistaken once. He meant to go gently thereafter. And partly for that reason, partly because of an imagination which made him always want to stand behind the eyes of others and see what different things they looked out upon, from the things which he saw himself, there had grown up within that compassion and sympathy which Gerard de Montignac had noticed as dangerous qualities.
So although in truth he was more impatient than Gerard that this woman should be gone, he betrayed no sign of it. She had surely humiliations enough each day without his adding yet another. Accordingly they sat about the table, and the woman began with the usual gambit of her class in the only game which she knew how to play.
“I have not seen you here before. You have just arrived in Casablanca, too—a few days ago? My name is Henriette. Only to think that a fortnight ago I was dining in the Café de Paris! But I wanted a change—so fatiguing, Paris!—and to pay my expenses meanwhile. So I dance here for a few weeks and return.”
Paul accepted the outrageous lie with a fine courtesy which was lost upon his friend, who for his part grinned openly, remembering the Commandant Marnier’s descriptions.
“And what is that little one, Marguerite Lambert, at her age and with her looks, doing here at the Villa Iris?” he asked bluntly.