Within the next hour ten or a dozen other guests had arrived, and they all seemed to know each other very well, and proceeded to make themselves quite at home. Ste. Marie regarded them with a reflective and not over-enthusiastic eye, and he wondered a good deal why he had been asked here to meet them. He was as far from a prig or a snob as any man could very well be, and he often went to very Bohemian parties which were given by his painter or musician friends, but these people seemed to him quite different. The men, with the exception of two eminent opera singers, who quite obviously had been asked because of their voices, were the sort of men who abound at such places as Ostend and Monte Carlo, and Baden Baden in the race week. That is not to say that they were ordinary racing touts or the cheaper kind of adventurers: there was a count among them, and a marquis who had recently been divorced by his American wife; but adventurers of a sort they undoubtedly were. There was not one of them, so far as Ste. Marie was aware, who was received anywhere in good society, and he resented very much being compelled to meet them.
Naturally enough he felt much less concern on the score of the ladies. It is an undoubted and wellnigh universal truth that men who would refuse outright to meet certain classes of their own sex show no reluctance whatever over meeting the women of a corresponding circle—that is, if the women are attractive. It is a depressing fact, and inclines one to sighs and head-shakes and some moral indignation, until the reverse truth is brought to light: namely, that women have identically the same point of view; that while they cast looks of loathing and horror upon certain of their sisters, they will meet with pleasure any presentable man whatever his crimes or vices.
Ste. Marie was very much puzzled over all this. It seemed to him so unnecessary that a man who really had some footing in the newer society of Paris should choose to surround himself with people of this type; but, as he looked on and wondered, he became aware of a curious and, in the light of a past conversation, significant fact. All of the people in the room were young, all of them in their varying fashions and degrees very attractive to look upon, all full to overflowing of life and spirits and the determination to have a good time. He saw Captain Stewart moving among them, playing very gracefully his role of host, and the man seemed to have dropped twenty years from his shoulders. A miracle of rejuvenation seemed to have come upon him; his eyes were bright and eager, the colour was high in his cheeks, and the dry pedantic tone had gone from his voice. Ste. Marie watched him, and at last he thought he understood. It was half revolting, half pathetic, he thought, but it certainly was interesting to see.
"He saw Captain Stewart moving among them."
Duval, the great basso of the Opéra, accompanied at the piano by one of the unclassified ladies, was just finishing Mefistofele's drinking song out of Faust when the door-bell rang.
CHAPTER XI
A GOLDEN LADY ENTERS: THE EYES AGAIN
The music of voice and piano was very loud just then, so that the little soft whirring sound of the electric bell reached only one or two pairs of ears in the big room. It did not reach the host certainly, and neither he nor most of the others observed the servant make his way among the groups of seated or standing people and go to the outer door, which opened upon a tiny hallway. The song came to an end, and everybody was cheering and applauding and crying bravo or bis, or one of the other things that people shout at such times, when, as if in unexpected answer to the outburst, a lady appeared between the yellow portières, and came forward a little way into the room. She was a tall lady of an extraordinary and immediately noticeable grace of movement, a lady with rather fair hair, but her eyebrows and lashes had been stained darker than it was their nature to be. She had the classic Greek type of face—and figure too—all but the eyes, which were long and narrow, narrow perhaps from a habit of going half closed; and when they were a little more than half closed, they made a straight black line that turned up very slightly at the outer end with an Oriental effect, which went oddly in that classic face. There is a very popular piece of sculpture now in the Luxembourg Gallery for which this lady "sat" as model to a great artist. Sculptors from all over the world go there to dream over its perfect line and contour, and little schoolgirls pretend not to see it, and middle-aged maiden tourists with red Baedeckers in their hands regard it furtively, and pass on, and after awhile come back to look again.
The lady was dressed in some close clinging material, which was not cloth-of-gold but something very like it, only much duller—something which gleamed when she stirred but did not glitter; and over her splendid shoulders was hung an Oriental scarf heavily worked with metallic gold. She made an amazing and dramatic picture in that golden room. It was as if she had known just what her surroundings would be and had dressed expressly for them.