“But it is nineteen words, Monsieur ffoulis. You said eighteen,” he ventured, but he assumed phlegm poorly.
“Duval counts as one,” replied Gaveston frigidly.
It was crushing.
Ortolans … ortolans … the wretched fellow saw his life crashing about him, here in this gilded, glittering Palace of Pleasure.
“Ze boat-train,” he muttered faintly as he rose. He rammed a broad-rimmed sombrero on his head and hurried from the Café.
“Huh!” said Gaveston, looking at his wrist-watch. “He has still time.” And with no tremor of emotion he bade the waiter bring another Bronx.
CHAPTER VI
VOYAGE EN CYTHÈRE
Outside the Café door, hard on midnight, Gaveston stood for a moment in delicious hesitation. There had, of course, been hours of dizzily brilliant talk as, one by one, the celebrities of pen and brush and chisel came forward to be presented. And Gaveston had triumphed, superbly. Somehow the evening and its experiences had made life more intricately beautiful, more complex in its manifold possibilities. Would he go back to the Albany by the Vigo Street entrance? Or would he rather walk abroad until dawn came, and then spend an hour in the cold, dim beauty of Covent Garden, watching the great wheeled wains of cauliflowers passing spectral through the morning mists? It was a prospect suddenly seductive in this new mood engendered by the marvellously fin-de-siècle atmosphere of the gilded smoking-room.