Within was a narrow hall, the further side of which was framed by glass windows that ran to the ceiling, and through which was visible a dining-room whose most conspicuous decorations were tubs of plants. At one end of the hall was a grill, and at the other end was another restaurant.
Grannis turned to a check-boy and surrendered his hat and coat. He threw a question at Clancy.
"Powder your nose?" He took it for granted that she would, and said: "I'll be up-stairs. Tea-room."
He sauntered toward an elevator without a glance at her. A maid showed Clancy to a dressing-room. She learned what she had not happened to discover at the Château de la Reine three nights ago—that every well-appointed New York restaurant has a complete supply of powder and puffs and rouge and whatever other cosmetics may be required.
She looked at herself in the mirror. She had never rouged in her life, considering it one of those acts the commission of which definitely establishes a woman as not being "good." So, even though her usually brilliant skin was pale with apprehension, she refused the maid's offer of artificial coloring. But she did use the powder.
Up-stairs she hesitated timidly on the threshold of the tea-room. An orchestra was playing, and a score of couples were dancing. This was Fifth Avenue, and a word overheard in the dressing-room had informed her that this restaurant was Ferroni's, one of the most famous, she believed, in the world. In her unsophistication—for Clancy was sophisticated only within certain definite limits; she could take care of herself in any conflict with a man, but would be, just now, helpless in the hands of a worldly woman—she supposed that Ferroni's patronage was drawn from the most exclusive of New York's society. Yet the people here seemed to be of about the same class as those who had been at the Château de la Reine on Monday night. They were just as noisy, just as quiet. The women were just as much painted, just as daring in the display of their limbs. They smoked when they weren't dancing.
Clancy would soon learn that the difference between Broadway and Fifth Avenue is something that puzzles students of New York, and that most students arrive at the conclusion that the only difference is that the Avenue has more money and has had it longer. Arriving at that truth, it is simple of comprehension that money makes society. There is a pleasant fiction, to which Clancy in her Maine rearing had given credence, that it takes generations to make that queer thing known as a "society" man or woman. She did not realize that all the breeding in the world will not make a cad anything but a cad, or a loose woman anything but a loose woman.
She had expected that persons who danced on Fifth Avenue would have round them some visible, easily discernible aura of gentility. For, of course, she thought that a "society man" must necessarily be a gentleman. But, so far as she could see, the only difference between this gathering and the gathering at Zenda's Broadway party was that the latter contained more beautiful women, and that the men had been better dancers.
The music suddenly stopped, and at that instant she saw Grannis sitting at a table across the room. Timidly she advanced toward him, but her timidity was in no wise due to her association with him. It was a shyness born of lack of confidence. She was certain that her shoes clattered upon the waxed floor and that every woman who noticed her smiled with amused contempt at her frock. These things, because Clancy was young, were of more importance than the impending interview with Grannis.
"That rouge becomes you," said Grannis brusquely, as she sat down in the chair beside him.