Mrs Stevanson walked now from group to group. The groups unfolded for her like flowers before the sun. She would disappear for a moment into the heart of one and then it would unfold again, release her and become tight and compact once more.
Certain groups contained people more important than other groups. In these she lingered longest, smiling the most attractively, saying her superlatives.
In the dining room a buffet had been set on a long table. Three footmen (hired for the evening only) guarded it from the hungry-looking guests, betrayed it to the superior ones who were not hungry.
Twenty or thirty people were gathered here and they looked rather self-conscious as she approached. Somehow everyone felt rather guilty to be caught eating heavily (they were eating heavily, she noticed) at a cocktail party.
She moved heartily about the dining room, demanding that they eat more, suggesting they try something they had not already tried. And then, to show she was mortal, she ate a piece of white bread with Virginia ham on it.
The dining room under control, Mrs Stevanson marched back through the drawing room, accepted greetings and homage with a tiny smile that one of her lovers (he was dead now) had said reminded him of La Gioconda.
Mrs Stevanson, among other things, believed in art. Tonight she had invited several writers, a few painters, one sculptor whose name she couldn’t remember, and a half-dozen actors whose names everyone knew.
She had also invited George Robert Lewis. For some obscure reason his middle name was always Gallicized, legitimatizing the Lewis. He had been born and raised in Alabama. Unfortunately for his family he had very early shown a passion for the artistic as well as a marked tendency toward Socratic love. When he decided that the thing he most wanted was to go to Paris and become an artist, his family did not object; in fact, his father had suggested that if he wanted to live the rest of his life in Paris it was all right with him. Lewis lived there in the Nineteen-Thirties. He returned in the Forties.
Mrs Stevanson thought him cute and she was in the habit of telling her friends that, although his habits were shocking, he was still quite charming and so advanced. And then he was marvelously decadent and the decadent was becoming popular now that the artificial virility of war was safely past.
George Robert Lewis was also an interesting person to know because he was the editor of Regarde, a magazine which had been called avant garde before that phrase became old-fashioned. Under his editorship the magazine had advanced all new things in the hope that one of the new things thus championed would be a success. So far none had but he still was championing and, though Mrs Stevanson seldom understood a word he said, she felt he was awfully brave to say the dreadful things he did about people and morals, especially people.