"My Carlottatralala! Dear Carlottatralala!"
Lightly at the door, Cassy strung the words to a mazourka. Her voice twisted, swung, danced into a trill that was captured by echoes that carried it diminishingly down the stairway of the mansion where Carlotta Tamburini lived.
"Eh?"
Partially the door opened. A fat slovenly woman showed an unpowdered nose, a loose unpainted mouth, and, at sight of Paliser, backed. "For God's sake! One moment, dearie. Straight ahead. With you in two shakes."
Cassy, her yellow frock swishing, led the way to a room furnished with heaped scores, with a piano, a bench, chairs and a portrait, on foot, of a star before the fall. Adjacently were framed programmes, the faded tokens of forgetless and forgotten nights, and, with them, the usual portraits of the usual royalties, but perhaps unusually signed. The ex-diva had attended to that herself.
Paliser, straddling the bench, put his hat on the piano and looked at Cassy, who had gone to the window. It was not the palaces opposite that she saw. Before her was a broken old man revamped. In his hand was a baton which he brandished demoniacally at an orchestra of his own. The house foamed with faces, shook with applause, and without, at the glowing gates, a chariot carried him instantly to the serenities of elaborate peace.
"It won't take over an hour."
The vision vanished. Across the way, in a window opposite, a young man was dandling, twirling one side of a moustache, cocking a conquering eye. Cassy did not see him. Directly behind her another young man was talking. She did not hear.
On leaving the restaurant and, after it, the music-shop, the car had taken them into the Park where Paliser, alleging that he was out of matches, had handed her into another restaurant where more Vichy was put before her and, with it, that question.
The air was sweet with lilacs. On the green beyond Cassy could see them, could see, too, a squirrel there that had gone quite mad. It flew around and around, stopped suddenly short, chattered furiously and with a flaunt of the tail, disappeared up a tree.