"Flattery," he declared, "is meat and drink to me. Tell me more."
She laughed lightly. "Thank you, no; vanity is unbecoming in men; I do not care to make you vain."
Aware that Cecelia Brooke was listening all the while she seemed to be enchanted with the patter of Mr. Revel and the less vapid observations of Velasco, Lanyard sought to shunt personalities from himself.
"And now a princess!"
"Did you not know I had married? Yes, a princess of Spain—and with a castle there, if you must know."
"Quite a change of atmosphere from Berlin," he remarked. "But it has done you no perceptible harm."
That won him a black look. "Oh, Berlin!" she said with contemptuous lips. "I haven't been there since the beginning of the war. I wish never to see the place again. True: I was born an Austrian; but is that any reason why I should love Germany?"
She leaned forward, her fan gently tapping the knuckles of his hand.
"Pay less attention to me," she insisted, with a nod toward the middle of the room. "You are missing something. Me, I never tire of her."
The floor had been cleared. A drummer on the dais was sounding the long-roll crescendo. At the culminating crash the lights were everywhere darkened save for an orange-coloured spot-light set in the ceiling immediately above the dancing floor. Into that circular field of torrid glare bounded a woman wearing little more than an abbreviated kirtle of grass strands with a few festoons of artificial flowers. Applause roared out to her, the orchestra sounded the opening bars of an Americanised Hawaiian melody, the woman with extraordinary vivacity began to perform a denatured hula: a wild and tawny animal, superbly physical, relying with warrant upon the stark sensuality of her body to make amends for the censored phrases of the primitive dance. The floor resounded like a great drum to the stamping of her bare feet, till one marvelled at such solidity of flesh as could endure that punishment.