For her she saw a man of twenty-five or six, tall, manly, and handsome in a splendid intellectual fashion, with fair hair clustered above a grand white brow, blue-gray eyes bright and laughing, a fair mustache ornamenting lips at once firm and sweet, a chin that was grave and full of power in spite of the womanish dimple that cleft it—altogether a most attractive face, and one that influenced her subtly, for some of the sullenness faded from her face, and with brightening eyes she exclaimed, with all the freedom of a child:
"Oh, I know you at sight! You are madame's handsome Yankee, n'est ce pas?"
He rose, laughing, and with his most elaborate bow.
"Eliot Van Zandt, at your service," he said. "Yes, I am the Yankee. And you?"
He saw the sullen gleam come back into her eyes, as she answered curtly, and, as it seemed, with repressed wrath:
"Oh. I am Little Nobody, madame says. I have always been too poor to have even a name. Have some fruit, please."
Madame tittered behind her elaborate fan, and the members of the Jockey Club exchanged glances. Eliot took an orange mechanically, and then the girl put the salver down and turned to go.
But Mme. Lorraine's dark eyes looked over the top of her fan with sarcastic amusement.
"Remain," she said, with cold brevity; and the girl flung herself angrily down into a chair, with her hands crossed and her tiny slippers dangling. With uplifted eyes she studied intently the face of the stranger.
"Handsome, is he, madcap?" at length queried Carmontelle, full of amusement.