With slow step and dainty feet that never hurried, the beautiful young woman strutted, in pride of her body’s perfection, upon the white carpet of the tablecloth.
In the shout of applause that greeted her, she skipped deftly from the table, flung herself upon Noll’s knees, held up his face, kissed him, and with “Thou handsome Englishman!” she laughed, put him gaily from her, proudly went her way, and was lost in the tumultuous throng.
She had set the fashion; on to the tables leaped a score of models, in fancy dress, and danced among the glasses; the great revel proceeding with riot and feasting and boisterous merriment.
In the midst of the whirlwind moved Gaston Latour, disguised in his usual affectation of lugubrious and melancholy seriousness. He went arrayed as Midnight Alarms—for trousers he wore a white shirt, his legs solemnly thrust through the sleeves, the cuffs fastened about his ankles with enormous brooches for gaudy sleeve-links, enormous naked indiarubber feet strapped on for boots. This symbolism of hurried midnight dressing was further insisted upon by the lady’s stays that bound the shirt’s tails about his waist, his shoulders bare, save for the great hunting-horn over his chest, and a fireman’s bucket strapped to the top of his head. The pretty little model who was with him, dressed solely in a pair of shoes and Gaston’s corduroy trousers, the braces holding them up, strapped over her white shoulders, replenished this bucket on his head during the evening with heel-taps from the wine-glasses, so that whilst talking confidentially to anyone, Gaston gradually lowered his head until the liquor splashed down upon their faces and trickled down the front of them—a result greeted by Gaston with a loud triumphant blare on the horn.
Gérôme’s students had drawn their tables into a semicircle; and before the centre table, where the massier sat, were two young Frenchmen in the armour of Roman lictors; they were holding up Ponsonby Wattles Ffolliott under the armpits, whilst he, dressed as Narcissus, with a bath towel strapped round his loins, and daffodils in his hair, was drunkenly attempting to make a speech.
He showed signs of going to sleep, spite of the occasional shaking up by the lictors; so, amidst loud laughter, they all held out their hands, thumbs down, and Gaston Latour advancing from his seat with a soup-tureen, poured a libation of soup over his hair, and as it trickled down his stupid pallid features, clapped the tureen on his head; the lictors carried him away and laid him upon the floor amongst a heap of black bottles, where he settled to uneasy rest, and mumbled into sleep....
Noll, his strong clean-cut features and his virile youth enhanced by the severe lines of the Roman helmet with its great framing steel cheek-pieces, and his well-set body and his shins glittering in the steel breast-plate and greaves of a classic warrior, sat at the outermost table of the semicircle. Beside him sat Madelaine, her white shoulders gleaming as she nestled close to him in the low-bodiced grey silk dress with great hooped skirt of Velasquez’s infantas. Babette, who sat at her other hand, had seized upon her early in the evening (taking her away without ceremony from Ffolliott, who was even then in a fuddled state from wine-bibbing), and Babette had sternly kept the girl by her side throughout the resulting riot. Indeed, the girl had not needed much compulsion, for she clung to Babette anxiously, and a little frightened. She was intoxicated with the whirl of her first ball; and she was very weary of Ffolliott. She was a little excited with wine, to which she was not accustomed. She was a little alarmed about Ffolliott—she had been flattered by his attention and proud of having caught his eyes a few days before; she had been thrilled at the prospect of the gown and still more by the gift of the silken stuff for its making—and, when she had stood in it before the mirror, she had realized her wondrous beauty, which it seemed to have suddenly enhanced and brought to view.
Noll touched her hand:
“Madelaine,” said he—“who gave you that dress?”