Grace turned towards her; a look of disappointment and melancholy came into her eyes, but it gave place after a moment to a happier expression. She smiled, she took Mrs. Chelifer’s hand and kissed it.
“I like you,” she said.
On the back of Mrs. Chelifer’s hand her lips had left a brown print of melted chocolate. “I think you’d better just give your face a little wipe with your napkin,” Mrs. Chelifer suggested.
“Perhaps if you dipped the corner of it first into the hot water….”
There was a silence. From the open-air dancing-floor, a hundred yards away beneath the trees, came the sound, a little dimmed by the intervening distance and the pervading Roman noise, of the jazz band. Monotonously, unceasingly, the banjos throbbed out the dance rhythms. An occasional squeak indicated the presence of a violin. The trumpet could be heard tooting away with a dreary persistence at the tonic and dominant; and clear above all the rest the saxophone voluptuously caterwauled. At this distance every tune sounded exactly the same. Suddenly, from the band-stand of the tea-garden a pianist, two fiddlers and a ’cellist began to play the Pilgrims’ Chorus out of Tannhäuser.
Irene and Lord Hovenden, locked in one another’s arms, were stepping lightly, meanwhile, lightly and accurately over the concrete dance-floor. Obedient to the music of the jazz band, forty other couples stepped lightly round them. Percolating insidiously through the palisade that separated the dance-floor from the rest of the world, thin wafts of the Pilgrims’ Chorus intruded faintly upon the jazz.
“Listen,” said Hovenden. Dancing, they listened. “Funny it sounds when you hear bof at ve same time!”
But the music from beyond the palisade was not strong enough to spoil their rhythm. They listened for a little, smiling at the absurdity of this other music from outside; but they danced on uninterruptedly. After a time they did not even take the trouble to listen.