"And with whom are you flirting, Sabini?"
"I should like to flirt with you; but you have always spurned me."
"Always!"
"Even now?"
"Even now. Why don't you flirt with Madame Lawrence, the beautiful Lawrence, the divine Lawrence, this year's professional beauty?"
"Thanks! She is too beautiful for me. Like you, she has twelve flirts."
"I have fourteen," replied Lia Norescu promptly, as she flashed her magnificent eyes. "And Miss Clarke, with her dowry of fifty, one hundred, or one hundred and fifty millions; why not pay court to her?"
Never in a soft womanly voice, in a voice young and sweet, in a French pronounced exquisitely, hissed such irony and such bitterness.
"I do not pay court to millionaire girls," replied Lucio Sabini, a little coldly.
"You court the others, the poor ones," replied Lia vivaciously; "but you marry neither: you don't want to marry anyone."