Delicately, with a coroneted handkerchief, he had wiped his face and was then mopping at his shirt.
Interrupting the operation, he looked up and laughed. “Oh, la, la! The dangers that may be avoided in remaining at home! These are the accidents of restaurant life!”
He laughed again. The laugh humanised and deformed the Pheidian beauty of his face. He bowed to Leilah, bowed to Violet and collectively added:
“Mesdames, I have ceased to be presentable. A thousand pardons. You will permit me?”
In a moment, after another bow, circular this time, a bow which while managing to omit Barouffski, included the rest of the table, he had gone.
“He looks like Keats,” said Silverstairs animated by an unconscious desire to second his wife and break the spell which still persisted. Ordinarily he would have taken her and gone. The assault had been as much of an affront to her as it had been to d’Arcy. But to have left the table would have been a reproof to Leilah, whom, in the ridiculous way in which society is organized, he was unable to disassociate from Barouffski.
“Keats!” Tempest, coming to his aid, exclaimed. “I’ll lay a guinea you would not know his picture if you saw it.”
Amiably Silverstairs tugged at his moustache. “Well, perhaps not. What I meant was that he looks like a poet.”
“I don’t agree with you,” Tempest retorted. “To begin with, there are not any. Besides, latterly there have been but two—Hugo, who looked like a green-grocer, and Swinburne who looked like a bookseller’s assistant. Moreover I hate poets, though, as someone said somewhere, an inability to write in verse can hardly be regarded as constituting a special talent. No, d’Arcy does not look like a poet, he looks like a poet’s creation.”