She was standing listlessly by the table. A mass of letters sent by special messenger from London after her, telegrams and cards lay there in a pile. Looking down at the lot, she murmured: “All right, I don’t care.”
He concealed his triumph, but before the look had faded from his face she saw it and exclaimed sharply:
“Don’t be crazy about it, you know. You’ll have to pay high for me; you know what I mean.”
He answered gallantly: “My dear child, I’ve told you that you would be the most charming princess in Hungary.”
Once more she accepted indifferently: “All right, all right, I don’t care tuppence—not tuppence”—and she snapped her fingers; “but I like to see you pay, Frederigo. Take me to Maxim’s.”
He demurred, saying she was far too ill, but she turned from him to call Higgins, determined to go if she had to go alone, and said to him violently: “Don’t think I’ll make your life easy for you, Frederigo. I’ll make it wretched; as wretched—” and she held out her fragile arms, and the sleeves fell back, leaving them bare—“as wretched as I am myself.”
But she was lovely, and he said harshly: “Get yourself dressed. I’ll go change and meet you at the lift.”
She made him take a table in the corner, where she sat in the shadow on the sofa, overlooking the brilliant room. Maxim’s was no new scene to either of them, no novelty. Poniotowsky scarcely glanced at the crowd, preferring to feast his eyes on his companion, whose indifference to him made his abstraction easy. She was his property. He would give her his title; she had demanded it from the first. The Hungarian was a little overdressed, with his jeweled buttons, his large boutonnière, his faultless clothes, his single eye-glass through which he stared at Letty Lane, whose delicate beauty was in fine play: her cheeks faintly pink, her starry eyes humid with a dew whose luster is of the most precious quality. Her unshed tears had nothing to do with Poniotowsky—they were for the boy. Her heart sickened, thinking where he might be; and more than that, it cried out for him. She wanted him.
Oh, she would have been far better for Dan than anything he could find in this mad city, than anything to which in his despair he would go for consolation. She had kept her word, however, to that old man, Mr. Ruggles; she had got out of the business with a fatal result, as far as the boy was concerned. She thought Dan would drift here probably as most Americans on their wild nights do for a part of the time, and she had come to see.