“I didn’t notice his face,” Ames retorted. “God, but I’m tired!” He stretched out full length on the couch after throwing off both coats. “You are absolutely right, Dmitri. Society is the pitfall and delusion, the desert of mirages.”
“It is not a success, then, the opera? Where is Carlota?” Dmitri talked with a cigarette balanced unsteadily in one corner of his mouth, and poured off the top of the coffee deftly into small cups. “You like a dash of rose or orange water, yes?”
“I don’t care what you give me. I’d drink a Lethe cocktail to-night,” groaned Ames. “They took her away from me, Dmitri. She isn’t poor or friendless or anything of that sort. It’s a damned lie. She’s the granddaughter of the great Italian diva, Paoli, and Ogden Ward is her financial backer. It reeks, lad, it reeks of the commonplace, and the rose of romance is a wired fraud.”
“That is very good,” Dmitri responded cheerfully. “A wired fraud peddled by the fakir Hope on street corners to catch just such boys as yourself. I told you all about it and you would not listen to me. Each lover imagines he is completely original in his unique adventure when it is merely the same old rondel sung over again. She is too beautiful to doubt, but the more beautiful they are the more you should doubt.”
Ames sat up, his head bowed.
“You see, the worst of it is no one will believe I did not know who she was all the time. She is the accredited pupil of Guido Jacobelli, and yet she permitted me to introduce her publicly as my pupil. Why did she ever come down to the Square and let me make-believe teach her?”
Dmitri’s eyebrows again became expressively active. He shook a few drops of orange water from a tiny glass decanter into each cup of coffee, and his next remark was apparently a diversion.
“Have you tried to pluck this Rose of Romance?”
“Oh, she knows I love her, of course. You don’t have to tell those things outright when you are persons like Carlota and myself.”
“Ah, to be sure, you sing it to each other; you play it in divine harmonies on the piano. I forget.”