“Quite true!” cries Leonide Leroux. “I have often noticed them yawn when I have been dying so beautifully in the Sphinx. What makes swells so sleepy, I wonder?”
“Affectation—a little ennui—and a great deal of dinner,” says Chavard.
“Let us go into the drawing-room and have some music,” Marguerite suggests, feeling possibly that at the supper-table she and Lord Delaval are too much en evidence.
So they all go, and Leonide Leroux sings them Il Bacio deliciously in a lovely soprano, while Marguerite lounges as usual in a large chair, and her eyes glance frequently at a group near the window of smokers, and which is composed of Scoboloff, Delaval and Rose Marigny, who puffs away prettily at a dainty Sultan doux, and evidently is no novice in the accomplishment.
Presently De Belcour draws near his hostess—De Belcour, with half his beauty spoiled by scowling eyes and a frown on his brow.
“Why waste your glances on people who don’t appreciate them?” he asks, in a low voice that has a sullen ring in it.
She laughs, and does not answer, so he pulls viciously at his long moustache to vent his anger on something, since he is afraid to vent it on her.
“You spoke the truth at supper to-night, Marguerite, when you said to woo a woman was a sure way not to win her; and yet, poets rave about the softness and the tenderness of women, and call them the link that unites earth with Heaven. Sapristi! for cold-blooded cruelty, for passionless devilment, a woman is to a man what a hawk is to a dove, a tigress to a tame cat!”
Marguerite elevates her pencilled brows slightly.
“I wish you would try and be less violent and abusive in your talk, Monsieur le Marquis: if you must talk to me, let the talk be endurable, anyway.”