"We'll have a look at him, anyway, before we give him the glad hand," Jerry temporized.
The cab discharged us into the press of black-coated men and bright-gowned women that at that hour poured steadily into the anteroom of Reeves's, which was level with the pavement, divided from it by a screen of plate glass and palms. Beyond that and raised by a few steps, was the palm room, flanked on either side by dressing rooms; and opening out back, the great revolving doors, muffled with crimson curtains, that received the guests and sorted them like a hopper, according to the degree of their resistance to the particular allurements of Reeves's. There was a sleek, satin-suited attendant who swung the leaves of the door at just the right angle that inducted you to the public café, or to the corridor that led to private rooms, and was famed never to have made a mistake. Jerry dared us hilariously as we went up the steps, to put his discrimination to the test.
"You and I alone then; Olivia's black dress would give us away," Sarah insisted.
"I want you to stay here and watch for Cecelia," she whispered to me; "I must see her; I must."
Her going on with Jerry would give her an opportunity to look through the café; if Cecelia hadn't already arrived, I would be sure to see her come in with the crowd that broke against the bank of palms into two streams of bright and dark, proceeding to the dressing rooms, and returning by twos and threes to be swallowed up by the hopper turning half unseen behind its velvet curtains. I slipped behind a group of bright-gowned women waiting for their escorts under the palms. I was hypnotized by the movement and the glitter; I believe I forgot what I was looking for; and all at once she was before me.
The theatrical quality of Cecelia's prettiness and the length of her plumes would have picked her out anywhere even without the blackened rim of the eyelids and the air she had always of having just stepped into the spot light.
She had stationed herself, with her professional instinct for effect, just under the Australian fern tree, waiting for her escort, and in the moment it took me to gather myself together he joined her. I had come up behind Cecelia and was brought face to face with him; it wasn't until he had wheeled into step with her that he saw me and his face went mottled all at once and settled to a slow purple. Cecelia was magnificent.
"Oh, you here! How de do!" She slipped her hand under her escort's arm and sailed out with him. I caught the glint of the brass-bound door under the curtains. I don't know how long I stood staring before I started after her, to be met by the leaves of the revolving door which, reversing its motion, projected Sarah and Jerry into the palm room beside me.
"I have been all over the café——" Sarah began.
"Didn't you meet her?"