And with that the turbulent redhead snatched the plate of squab that rested in the tapering hand of the enchantress and carefully emptied its contents into the lady's elaborate hair-do.
"Mon dieu!" the woman screamed as she shot out of her chair. She swung about and eyed Toffee malevolently through a trickle of gravy. "So! The mademoiselle would be the wildcat, eh?" She glanced quickly about for ammunition and found it on a neighboring table. Scooping a plate of soup from beneath the owner's very spoon, she turned furiously and prepared to hurl it into Toffee's face. "I have never been so insult in all my life!"
"Put that soup down, Fifi," Toffee warned, "or you're going to get insult in places you didn't know you had."
The soggy siren did as she was told, but only by accident. As she started toward Toffee, the plate of soup slithered out of her hand, looped gracefully through the air and landed upside down in the lap of a lavender-laced matron. Heaving herself from her chair, the matron trumpeted her displeasure to the assemblage at large, armed herself with a pitcher of water, and entered the fray. Stepping with great dignity to the side of the besieged European, she heaved the contents of the pitcher in the general vicinity of her mid-section. Then, with great pleasure, she threw back her head and laughed. Just in time to receive a plateful of oysters squarely in the face.
In the next moment the entire room had entered into the spirit of the occasion. Naturally repressed, the guests of the Wynant were quick to seize upon this opportunity to give expression to their pent up feelings. Pandemonium ruled the room from end to end. Trays and diners slid across the floor together with an air of abandoned democracy. Mrs. Jones, having long resented the upward tilt of Mrs. Smythe's nose, did her level best to lower it with a sauce bottle. The action, for the main part, however, gravitated frenziedly toward the center of the room where it had started. Toffee, having applied the squab to her victim, was now gustily engaged in massaging it into the scalp, all the way to the bone if possible.
Marc, for his part, was busily engaged in reaping the spoils of the battle. He picked up an abandoned roll here, an unwanted steak there, and even occasionally caught a delicacy as it flew through the air. He stuffed himself as ravenously as a starved road-worker at a free lunch. The Blemishes remained seated at the table, thoroughly confused and disillusioned at the activities of the upper classes. The waiter merely leaned back in his chair with an enigmatic smile and enjoyed to the fullest the spectacle of these people doing to each other what he had been secretly tempted to do to them nightly for several years.
Marc, still concerned with the matter of dining, reached out for an abandoned pudding and discovered new and still more alarming element in the fracas. Just as his hand was closing in on the dessert, the dish suddenly leaped into the air, poised itself carefully, then sailed across the room to catch a portly gentleman neatly at the side of the ear. In a seizure of surprise, as the gooey mess dribbled into his collar, the man whirled about and dealt his female companion a stinging blow across the bridge of her nose.
"Oh!" he gasped in instant regret. "I'm so terribly sorry!"
For a moment the woman only stared at him without expression. Then, with slow calm she reached out to the table, picked up a bottle of wine, carefully removed the cloth from around it, and belted her abject attacker a solid blow across the crown of the head.