With a movement of impatience, yet otherwise ignoring him completely, Leilah turned again to d’Arcy.
Barouffski was not in a mood to be ignored. The sight of d’Arcy in the afternoon, the man’s unawaited advent at the Opéra, his demeanour to Leilah, her attitude to him, the hazards which both seemed to suggest; yet chiefly the precariousness of his own position, the constant effort to appear other than what he was, the consciousness of danger ever present, the obligation to cover irritation with calm, anxiety with banter, these things and the tension of them, fevered and enraged. At the moment he felt like a fiend and looked it. A moment only. Reacting at once, he compressed his lips, parted them and summoning his ambiguous smile, called out:
“If the chaudfroid says nothing to you, will you not try the mousse?”
Leilah was raising a glass to her lips. She looked over it at him and, much as though he were a servant, said:
“Do me the favour to attend to your own affairs.”
Barouffski’s smile evaporated. A man with no sense of honour and some sense of humour may go far, provided that he keep his temper. Barouffski knew it but forgot it. With a tone of authority which in the rue de la Pompe he would have ordinarily avoided, angrily he replied:
“Then do me the favour not to drink any more.”
Leilah, the glass at her lips, paused, looked over it again, and very gently, almost sweetly, with the pretty air of a spoiled child, nodded at him.
“Only one sip.”