He walked with her to the lift, said good-bye and returned to the fiacre with the tinkling bell. There was a stunned sort of look in his face. The fiacre meter registered two francs seventy. Max Tack did a lightning mental calculation. The expression on his face deepened. He looked up at the cabby—the red-faced, bottle-nosed cabby, with his absurd scarlet vest, his mustard-coloured trousers and his glazed top hat.
"Well, can you beat that? Three francs thirty for the evening's entertainment! Why—why, all she wanted was just a little love!"
To the bottle-nosed one all conversation in a foreign language meant dissatisfaction with the meter. He tapped that glass-covered contrivance impatiently with his whip. A flood of French bubbled at his lips.
"It's all right, boy! It's all right! You don't get me!" And Max Tacked pressed a five-franc piece into the outstretched palm. Then to the hotel porter: "Just grab a taxi for me, will you? These tubs make me nervous."
Sophy, on her way to her room, hesitated, turned, then ran up the stairs to the next floor and knocked gently at Miss Morrissey's door. A moment later that lady's kimonoed figure loomed large in the doorway.
"Who is—oh, it's you! Well, I was just going to have them drag the Seine for you. Come in!"
She went back to the table. Sheets of paper, rough sketches of hat models done from memory, notes and letters lay scattered all about. Sophy leaned against the door dreamily.
"I've been working this whole mortal evening," went on Ella Morrissey, holding up a pencil sketch and squinting at it disapprovingly over her working spectacles, "and I'm so tired that one eye's shut and the other's running on first. Where've you been, child?"
"Oh, driving!" Sophy's limp hair was a shade limper than usual, and a strand of it had become loosened and straggled untidily down over her ear. Her eyes looked large and strangely luminous. "Do you know, I love Paris!"
Ella Morrissey laid down her pencil sketch and turned slowly. She surveyed Sophy Gold, her shrewd eyes twinkling.