She looked at him darkly.
“You wish to quarrel with me,” she said, “very well then, I am quite content.”
“So that’s your game, is it?” exclaimed Twelves, with unexpected ferocity. “You drink champagne with me for a couple of hours and then think you can do what you like. The green roses have come and you must pay for them.”
He pulled out his pocket-book in order to pay for the wine, but before he had handed the waiter the money, she held out her hand, palm upwards, and placed it on the table.
“One hundred and twenty-five drachmæ for me,” she whispered; and, without a moment’s hesitation, he handed her five 25-drachmæ notes.
Then an amazing thing happened. Quite openly, she swung round in her chair and handed the five notes to the man she called “the Maestro.” He took them and placed them carefully in his pocket; but, as he did so, he kept his eyes fixed on Twelves. Twelves returned his gaze steadily. In the eyes of the stranger I saw a look of amusement and half-veiled contempt. And certainly Twelves was appearing in a contemptible light. Even physically he was contemptible, for he looked very diminutive by Zuleika’s side, and it was only his firm jaws and clear eyes that redeemed him from futility.
“Before we go we will drink this last bottle,” she said.
They sat side by side without a word, drinking their champagne. As I was, so to speak, out of it, I turned my head and gazed at the scene of mad revelry that met my eyes, wondering and trying to discover precisely what it was that made the frantic abandonment of the night different from similar evenings I had spent in Paris, Marseilles, Cairo, and Athens. I came to the conclusion that the difference was chiefly in the women. They had no tenderness, no passion, no sense of adventure, no enjoyment. They were simply rapacious. They did not walk: they prowled. They did not sit: they couched....
During the last half-hour the chairs and tables in the middle of the room had been removed and a few couples had started a bizarre form of tango. A woman with bared breasts and arms, a broad crimson sash wound three times round her body her only clothing, focused the onlookers’ attention. She was tall and graceful, and her body imitated the movements of a snake. It was horrible, but it was fascinating, and the beast that is in most of us leapt to the faces of the men who looked on and made them seem inhuman. Here was another huntress, but I felt that her potential victims were as rapacious as she, and that soon she would be their prey.
From the tail of my eye I saw Twelves and Zuleika rise and move from our table. It was as I had guessed. She would not repulse him here, but in the spacious hall outside, for even in the White Tower “scenes” are not tolerated.