He entered a veranda where people sat at little tables eating ices frozen in the shape of Fuji, under fairy lamps whose tiny bamboo and paper shades were delicately painted with sworls of water and swimming carp. From one group the Baroness Stroloff waved a hand to him, but Barbara was not there. Beyond, through a canopied doorway, hung the cherry-blooms. He paused on the threshold. It was a portion of the garden walled in with white cloth, and roofed with blue and gold. The space thus inclosed was set with cherry-trees from whose every gray twig depended the great pink pendants. It was floored with soft carpeting, in the center a fountain tinkled coolly, and the roof was dotted with incandescents. In this retreat the violins of the ball-room wove dreamily with the talk and laughter, tenuous and ghost-like, soft as the music of memory. She was not there. Daunt turned back, threaded the hall and entered the ball-room.
There, through the shifting crowd, over flashing uniforms and diamonded tiaras, he saw her. Beside her stood a little countess, one of the noted court beauties, lotos-pale, bamboo-slender, in a kimono of Danjiro blue, with woven lilies. In the clear radiance, Barbara stood almost surrounded. Her white satin gown shimmered in the light, which caught like globes of fire in the gold passion-flowers with which it was embroidered. A new sense of her beauty poured over him. She had always seemed lovely, but now her loveliness was touched with something removed and spiritual. In the blaze of light she looked as delicately pale as a moon-dahlia, but a spot of color was on either cheek and her eyes were very bright. Daunt stood still, feasting his gaze.
The Baroness Stroloff paused beside him, chatting with the Cabinet Minister and the representative of the Associated Press. They watched the forms flit past in the swinging rhythm of the deux-temps, kimono weaving with black coats and uniforms, varnished pumps gliding with milk-white tabi and velvet pattens. "Pretty tinted creatures," she said. "How do they ever keep on those little thonged sandals?"
"Ah, their toes were born to them," the journalist answered.
The statesman shrugged his shoulders. "Waltzing in kimono with men is very, very modern for our Japanese ladies," he said. "I myself never saw it until two years ago—when the American Fleet was here. That established it as a fashion. Some of us older ones may frown, but—shikata-ga-nai! 'Way out there is none,' as we say in our language. It's a part of the process of Westernization!"
Daunt started when Patricia's fan tapped his arm.
"You're frightfully late," she said, as her partner, the German Chargé, bowed himself away. "Father will give you a wigging if you don't look out."
"I saw him a few moments ago," he answered. "He didn't seem very fierce."
"Was he still looking at those spooky curios? I can't see what anybody wants such things for! I always feel like saying what Mark Twain's man said when they showed him the mummy: 'If you've got any nice fresh corpse, trot him out.'"
Daunt's smile was a mechanism. She knew that he had ceased to listen. As she looked at his side-face with her clear, kind eyes, a shadow came to her own. Her loyal heart was troubled. After her drive that afternoon, Barbara had kept her room on the plea of rest for the evening; she had not come down to dinner and had appeared only at the moment of starting. At the first glance, then, Patricia had noticed the change. The Barbara she had always known, of flashing impulses and girlish graces, was gone; the Barbara of the evening had seemed suddenly older, of even rarer beauty, perhaps, but with something of detachment, of unfamiliarity. Riding beside her to the ball, Patricia had felt, under the eager, brilliant gaiety, this chilly sense of estrangement, and it had puzzled her. Later she had come to connect it with the man of whose coming Barbara had told her, the man with handsome, bearded face who had seemed, since his greeting in the moment of their entrance, to take unobtrusive yet assured possession of such of her moments as were not given to the great. Withal, he had lent this an air of the natural and habitual which, nicely poised and completely conventional as it was, seemed to convey a subtle atmosphere of proprietorship. So now, as she saw Daunt's gaze, Patricia was a little sad. There had fallen a silence between them which he broke with a sudden exclamation.