The table was packed tightly between other tables, and in the moment of intoxication he had no glance to spare for his neighbors. Even Blake's voice when it came to him sounded far away and impersonal.
"Sit down, boy! What will you drink?"
"What you drink, mon ami, I will drink."
He sat down and, with a new exuberance, threw himself back in his seat. It was a moment of bravado that reckoned not at all with circumstance; his gesture was imperiously reckless, the space about him was crowded to suffocation; by a natural sequence of events his head came into sharp contact with the waving plumes of a hat at the table behind him.
With volubility and dispatch the owner of the hat expressed her opinion of his awkwardness; one or two people near them laughed, and, flushing a desperate red, he turned, raised his hat, and offered an apology.
The possessor of the feathers was a woman of thirty who looked ten years older than her age; her face was unhealthily pale even beneath its mask of powder, and her eyes were curiously lifeless, but her clothes were costly and her figure fine, if a trifle robust. At sound of the boy's voice she turned. Her movement was slow and deliberate; her gaze, in which a dull resentment smouldered, passed over his confused, flushed face, and rested upon Blake's; then a light, if light it might be called, glimmered in her eyes, and her immobile face relaxed into a smile.
"'Allo, mon cher! But I thought you had dropped out of life!"
The boy, with a startled movement, turned his eyes on Blake; but Blake was smiling at the woman with the same pleasant smile—half humorous, half satirical—that he had bestowed dispassionately upon the young Englishman in the train the night before, and upon the little café proprietress of the rue Fabert—the smile that all his life had been a passport to the world's byways.
"What! you, Lize!" he was saying easily, and with only the faintest shadow of surprise. "Well, if I have been dead, I am now resurrected! Let's toast old times, since you are alone. Garçon! Garçon!"
Out of the crowd a waiter answered his call. Wine was brought, three glasses were brought and filled, while Max watched the performance—watched the ease and naturalness of it with absorbed wonder.