"Don't chatter too much, child," Louise said benignly. "I want to hear some more of Mr. Strangewey's impressions. This is—well, if not quite a fashionable crowd, yet very nearly so. What do you think of it—the women, for instance?"
"Well, to me," John confessed candidly, "they all look like dolls or manikins. Their dresses and their hats overshadow their faces. They seem all the time to be wanting to show, not themselves, but what they have on."
They all laughed. Even the prince's lips were parted by the flicker of a smile. Sophy leaned across the table with a sigh.
"Louise," she pleaded, "you will lend him to me sometimes, won't you? You won't keep him altogether to yourself? There are such a lot of places I want to take him to!"
"I was never greedy," Louise remarked, with an air of self-satisfaction. "If you succeed in making a favorable impression upon him, I promise you your share."
"Tell us some more of your impressions, Mr. Strangewey," Sophy begged.
"You want to laugh at me," John protested good-humoredly.
"On the contrary," the prince assured him, as he fitted a cigarette into a long, amber tube, "they want to laugh with you. You ought to realize your value as a companion in these days. You are the only person who can see the truth. Eyes and tastes blurred with custom perceive so little. You are quite right when you say that these women are like manikins; that their bodies and faces are lost; but one does not notice it until it is pointed out."
"We will revert," Louise decided, "to a more primitive life. You and I will inaugurate a missionary enterprise, Mr. Strangewey. We will judge the world afresh. We will reclothe and rehabilitate it."
The prince flicked the ash from the end of his cigarette.