Beaupaire looked at Payot and they both laughed.
As they entered Beaupaire's drawing-room he introduced his guests to Madame Beaupaire, who rose at once and welcomed them effusively, with both hands outstretched.
"Allow me, gentlemen, to introduce you to my daughter Violette."
Marcel and Payot bowed and shook hands. Marcel, who was of a very impressionable nature, became visibly affected by her beauty and striking personality.
Violette was an uncommon specimen of her race. Born of a French father and Spanish mother, she was at the same time an enigma to her acquaintances and a revelation to strangers. Her hair was long and black with that peculiar bluish lustre of a raven's wing. Her face was of ivory whiteness, regular in outline, with a finely chiselled nose, which grew out of her face like that of a Greek goddess, and just tipped in a most provoking manner to render the nostrils visible, while her lips were firm and rosy and delicately curved like cupid's bow. Moreover, her brilliant eyes which, like her features, were constantly on the move, gave her that charm of expression which is at once so fascinating and dangerous to the other sex. At one moment she was sweetness itself and polite to a degree, and then suddenly, without warning, her mischievous smile would change into a look of scorn or disapproval, which would completely upset all the calculations of her companions as to her real feelings. Highly gifted herself, she delighted in nothing better than a passage-of-arms with a man whom she felt to be her superior, but was herself loth to admit it.
"Have you lived a long time in Paris, mademoiselle?" enquired Marcel, when they had sat down to dinner.
"Oh, yes, we have been here for some years now, but Paris is not my birth-place you know," she answered with a smile.
"And what town, may I ask, has been so fortunate as to claim mademoiselle as a citizen?"
"Buenos Aires, monsieur," she replied in a soft, musical voice, and darting a quick glance at Marcel, and then lowering her eyelashes in a way that sent a thrill of emotion down to his very boots.