"You eat and drink nothing," Mrs. Faversham said to him.
"No," exclaimed Potowski, sympathetically, peering across the table at Rainsford. "You are suffering perhaps—you diet?"
Antony drank the champagne in his glass and said he was thinking of his bas-relief.
Potowski, adjusting a single eye-glass in his eye, stared through it at Rainsford.
"You should do everything in its entirety, Mr. Rainsford. Eat, drink, sculpt and sing," and he swam out again gently toward Rainsford and Mrs. Faversham, "and love."
Antony smiled on them both his radiant smile. "Ah, sir," he said, "is not that just the thing it is hard for us all not to do? We mutilate the rest, our art and our endeavours, but a young man usually once in his life loves in entirety."
"I don't know," said the Pole thoughtfully, "I think perhaps not. Sometimes it's the head, or the hands, or the figure, something we call perfect or beautiful as long as it lasts, Mr. Rainsford, but if we loved the entirety there would be no broken marriages."
Mrs. Faversham, whom the musician entertained and amused, laughed softly and rose, and, a man on each side of her, went into the drawing-room, to the fire burning across the andirons. Coffee and liqueurs were brought and put on a small table.
"Potowski is a philosopher, is he not, Mr. Rainsford? When you hear him sing, though, you will find that his best argument."
Potowski stirred six lumps of sugar into his small coffee cup, drank the syrup, drank a glass of liqueur with a sort of cheerful eagerness, and stood without speaking, dangling his eyeglass and looking into the fire. Mrs. Faversham took a deep chair and her dark, slim figure was lost in it, and Antony, who had lit his cigarette, leaned on the chimney-piece near her.