"Lize," said Blake, as the waiter disappeared, "my friend who dared to interfere with that marvellous hat is called Max. Won't you smile upon him?"
Max blushed again, he could not have told why, and the lady smiled—a vague, detached smile.
"A pretty boy!" she said. "He ought to have been a woman." Then, sensible of having discharged her duty, she turned again to Blake.
"And the world, mon cher? It has been kind to you?"
Blake laughed and drank some of his wine. "Oh, I can't complain! If it isn't quite the same world that it was, the fault's in me. I'm getting old, Lize! Eight-and-thirty come next March!"
A palpable chill touched the woman; she shivered, then laughed a little hysterically, and finished her wine.
"Ssh! Ssh! Don't say such things!"
Blake refilled her glass. "I was jesting. A man is as old as he feels; a woman—" He lifted his own glass and smiled into her eyes with a certain kindliness of understanding. "Come, Lize! The old times aren't so far behind us! 'Twas only yesterday that Jacques Aujet painted you as the Bacchante in his 'Masque of Folly.' Do you remember how angry you were when he used to kiss you, and the grape juice used to run into your hair and down your neck? Why, 'twas hardly yesterday!"
The woman looked down, and for a moment a shadow seemed to rest upon her—a something tangible and even fearful, that lent to her mask-like face a momentary humanity.
"Mon ami," she said, in a toneless voice, "do you remember that Jacques is ten years dead?"