By an unlucky chance the seat she had carefully kept for him by her side fell to someone else's share. This put her out; but there was champagne to cheer up everyone.
Lilly, out of defiance and boredom, drank far more than was good for her. Her eyes began to blaze with a challenging merriment; her cheeks took on the rosy-apple hue which all her friends delighted in. Her laughter became shriller, her movements more and more animated. Suddenly there was a loud call for "Lilly." Lilly was to perform.
Her heart misgave her. Not once, as yet, had she dared to recite in his presence. Indeed, no one had thought of asking her when he was of the company, for he was always the centre of attraction. Then she felt, "To-day I can do anything--to-day I will show him what there is in me."
She stood up, tossed back the hair from her forehead, and shook herself ... shook off every vestige of the everyday Lilly; the Lilly subject to fits of depression and faintheartedness; the vacillating, inanimate Lilly.... Now she was off. She first plunged into an imitation of "La belle Otero," and crowed and whooped so that her audience laughed till it cried.... Then she mimicked a star of the cabarets, ... sucked her thumb in babylike simplicity and piped, "Let me in, I say, into your room to-day." In a comical double-bass she growled, "An ambassador would a-wooing go." Half-hidden behind the hatstand she cooed the song of the passionate love-pigeon, "Gurr ... gurr ... keak." Finally they begged her to dance. At first she protested, but in vain; she had to give in. Tables and chairs were moved out of the way, and making her own dance-music between her teeth, she whirled madly round the room, till half-fainting she collapsed into a corner.
The applause seemed as if it would never stop. The women devoured her with kisses, the men stroked her arms and hair, and Richard stood silent and pale with pride, in his Napoleonic attitude, and gnawed his moustache ends. Dr. Salmoni, however, kept in the background, smiled a melancholy modest smile, and looked as if he had nothing on earth to do with what had passed. Only one brief glance of understanding, that he threw at her like a laurel-wreath, told her that he knew for whom she had let herself go. When the party broke up, she was still glowing with ecstasy from head to foot.
Yes! this was the genuine intoxication, of the charms of which he had lately spoken to her; it was like a hissing flame darting through your heart and limbs.
It was he who helped her on with her fur coat, for Richard was engaged in paying the bill; and while he carefully placed the sable boa round her shoulders, he whispered close to her ear, "May I call to-morrow?"
"Yes," she said, terrified at herself; and then, in defiance of her own cowardice, she turned brusquely on her heel and shouted back in his face four or five times, as if in wrath, "Yes, yes, yes, yes!"
"What is the matter with her?" people asked each other.
But she laughed a short, hard laugh. What did she care for them? Was she not once more scaling the heights?