"All right. If she is nice I'll bring her."
"She looks charming."
Tom Randolph pressed Martin's hand and was off. There was a sound of a kiss in the darkness.
"I say, I've got to have something to eat," said the Englishman. "I didn't have a bit of dinner. I say—mangai, mangai." He made gestures of putting things into his mouth in the direction of the fat woman.
The three women put their heads together. One of them knew a place, but it was a dreadful place. Really, they mustn't think that ... She only knew it because when she was very young a man had taken her there who wanted to seduce her.
At that everyone laughed and the voices of the women rose shrill.
"All right, don't talk; let's go there," said one of the Australians. "We'll attend to the seducing."
A thick woman, a tall comb in the back of her high-piled black hair, and an immovable face with jaw muscled like a prize-fighter's, served them with cold chicken and ham and champagne in a room with mouldering greenish wall-paper lighted by a red-shaded lamp.
The Australians ate and sang and made love to their women. The Englishman went to sleep with his head on the table.
Martin leaned back out of the circle of light, keeping up a desultory conversation with the woman beside him, listening to the sounds of the men's voices down corridors, of the front door being opened and slammed again and again, and of forced, shrill giggles of women.