The decent gentleman in him became wide awake, the sense of comeliness and propriety. He wasn't in the least shocked—indeed there was nothing whatever to be shocked about—but he wanted to save her, in time, from an after-realisation of a frankness that might give her moments of confusion.
He did it, as he did everything when he was really sober, really himself, with a supreme grace and delicacy. "Cupid dear," he said with his open and boyish smile, "you really oughtn't to tell me that, you know. I mean—well, think!"
She looked at him with puzzled eyes for a moment and then she took his meaning. A slight flush came into her cheeks.
"Oh, I see," she replied thoughtfully, and then, with a radiant smile and the provocative, challenging look—"Gilbert dear, you seem just like a girl to me. I quite forgot you were a man. So it doesn't matter, does it?"
Who was to attempt to preserve les convenances with such a delightful child as this?
"Here is the dessert," he said gaily, as waiters brought ices, nectarines, and pear-shaped Paris bon-bons filled with Benedictine and Chartreuse.
A single bottle of champagne had served them for the meal. Gilbert lit a cigarette and said two words to a waiter. In a minute he was brought a carafe of whiskey and a big bottle of Perrier in a silver stand. It was a dreadful thing to do, from a gastronomic or from a health point of view. Whiskey, now! He saw the look of wonder on the waiter's face, a pained wonder, as who should say, "Well, I shouldn't have thought this gentleman would have done such a thing."
But Lothian didn't care. It was only upon the morning after a debauch, when with moles' eyes he watched every one with suspicion and with fear, that he cared twopence what people thought about anything he did.
He was roused to a high pitch of excitement by his beautiful companion. Recklessness, an entire abandon to the Dance of the Hours was mounting up within him. But where there's a conscience, there's a Rubicon. The little brook stretched before him still, but now he meant to leap over it into the forbidden, enchanted country beyond. He ordered "jumping powder."
He drank deeply, dropped his cigarette into the copper bowl of rose water at his side and lit another.