I followed at a discreet distance, feeling a sudden nausea at the vice around me and longing for the northern mountains of Greece where I had spent the winter. There was a sickly smell of heliotrope, and the air was misty with tobacco smoke.
When they had reached the hall, Twelves and Zuleika stopped in earnest conversation, but I moved on to the cloakroom to get our hats and sticks. This occupied me for only a minute, but when I had returned I found my companions in the midst of a furious, though subdued, quarrel.
Twelves hardly spoke, but when he did so, he jerked out a sentence in a whisper so passionate that it sounded more urgent than a scream. Fragments of the conversation reached me.
“But it’s impossible,” exclaimed Zuleika, “to-morrow. Not now.... My husband is here. Yes, yes, yes! I have told you already. The Maestro is my husband. He would kill me.... How dare you! But you Englishmen are all pigs. I go back to the room. And you ... you clear out!”
She stretched out her arm with a superb gesture and pointed to the door. But Twelves stood resolute.
“You red fiend!” he whispered, “but I will have you yet.”
Two waiters had stopped to watch. One of them, a lascivious Greek, broke into a giggle.
“You are coming with me and you are coming now,” said Twelves, “if you don’t, I shall have no mercy on you.”
Then she laughed and threw her beaded satchel over Twelves’ head to one of the waiter’s behind her. He caught it, and she folded her arms.
“I could laugh at you,” she said, “but if I once began I should never stop. What is it you say in England—‘No fool like an old fool,’ isn’t it? And a fool always threatens what he can’t do. You will have no mercy on me! Boo!”