"And very stupid of it, if you ask me," Liane retorted. "See that he gets a card, will you."
"You are much too gracious, Liane; I shall have so little use for a guest-card—"
"What are you talking about, Michael? Guest-card! I should say not. I am proposing you for membership. It costs nothing when one is properly introduced. Eh, Theodore?"
"As mademoiselle says . . . If Monsieur Lanyard will be so kind as to let me have his address . . ."
With a shrug, Lanyard gave in. After all, it didn't matter. . . . And when he had duly been entered in the club register, Theodore escorted the newly fledged member to the foot of the stairs, upon which Liane Delorme was picturesquely waiting, and there turned both over to the guidance of a highly polished sub-altern.
Wide doorways on the first landing disclosed a chain of rooms dedicated to the rites of jazz, liquid, instrumental, terpsichorean. Calculated to remind a crusading clergyman of Belshazzar's Feast, they reminded Lanyard of almost any Broadway restaurant at midnight.
On the second landing, however, a break in the dance music below made audible the heartless laughter of an ivory ball coquetting with a roulette wheel behind one closed door, while a waiter emerging from another room permitted a glimpse of a private supper party at the peak of its lead, an interior tolerably Hogarthian.
Lanyard exchanged amused glances with Liane. "Busy little club," he commented, "but wants rechristening—Clique's far too conservative—should be known as the Liberal."
At the rear end of the hall another door admitted to a prettily furnished supper room, where a table was being laid and, in coolers on a side-table, several bottles of champagne were enjoying their last rest. Requesting the waiter in attendance to open one of these, Liane shrugged out of her wrap—which Lanyard took, though he kept his overcoat on by way of pointing an intention to stop for a few minutes only—and having made herself at ease upon the club fender of an open fire, clinked her glass to Lanyard's.
"To you, my too-long lost friend, and to me—to a friendship that has known too many interruptions and must henceforth know fewer."