It consoled her to catch sight again of her friend, whom she had entirely forgotten. Leaning on his arm, she related, with a radiant face and half-inarticulate from laughter, her merry experiences.
It was then she noticed that the eyes of all those who were near seemed bent on her with a strange seriousness and as if moved to sudden compassion. But she was too busy talking to think much about it. She begged him to stay at her side when the recitations began. She was tired of playing the fool, she said, and wanted now something homelike.
He gave her arm a grateful pressure.
"Why are you trembling?" she asked him in astonishment.
"It's nothing," he answered lightly.
The first reciter was one of the long-haired collarless brigade, who had been asked to open the programme with a solemn and weighty chorale.
He declaimed an ode entitled "Super-smoke," which was Greek to Lilly, but she supposed it was very fine, because at the end there was an outbreak of stormy applause among the men.
"Bravo, bravo! Super-smoke, more Super-smoke!" they shouted.
The long-haired collarless one, who took this for an encore, bowed, highly flattered, and started off again: "Super-smoke, an ode." But he got no further. Roars of "That's enough! that's enough!" came from all sides, and it appeared that the men had been only expressing a desire for something smokable when they had called out "More Super-smoke."
The next to appear on the rostrum was a slender, exceedingly elegant person with a short pointed brown beard and glittering monocle. He was a Dr. Salmoni, to whom Lilly had been introduced. With a melancholy smile he held his hand close to his nose and examined his finger-nails, as he said that it was his purpose to draw up an intellectual synopsis of the evening's entertainment, and to throw in a few remarks on the "destructive construction of social formlessness."