THREE weeks after issue the Greek loan had been doubly subscribed at the offices of the Apostolatos Bank alone. One evening Irene and Lewis decided to celebrate this success and to emerge from their solitude.
There were no half-measures in their celebration.
Irene wore a silver tissue dress which contrasted with her face, deepening the warmth of her Oriental complexion: she was black and silver like the ikons of her country.
"How perfect she is," thought Lewis, going to fetch her in her room, and looking at her lithely curving body beneath the clinging dress.
They dined, too well, in the midst of dancing, rounded shoulders, and machine-like dinner jackets. Irene compared these stars from the Rue de la Paix, the laughter and the surfeit of make-up, with Trieste in the evening, with its two cinemas and the officers wrapped in their capes stalking up and down before the Café du Veneto. The whole evening they wandered from one cabaret to another, from the Rue Caumartin to Montmartre. Up there Lewis met some friends.
Whilst a dancer, caught in a bundle of limelight rays, was carrying his partner off round his neck like a deer, Irene found herself being introduced to a handsome, self-possessed, slightly faded woman with a geranium-coloured mouth and sly eyes, who immediately took an interest in her.
At the first opportunity she asked Lewis her name.
"Why, it's Elsie Magnac."
Lewis had often spoken of her. Without ever having met her Irene had taken a dislike to her.
"I don't even like to think of her being alive," she told Lewis one day.