He conceded:
"Of course I don't suggest that you were done in the eye. Probably you got the value of your dibs. But you'll have something better to spend cash on presently. Me, too! We must both draw in our horns now, Kittums. For the sake of—you know who! ... Hullo! Is anything wrong?"
She had winced, but she gritted her little teeth, and fought back the rising hysteria. She could have shrieked, or thrown the little coffee-pot at his head. He went on, recognising friends through the smoke-haze:
"There's Lady Beau with that German aviator-chap we met in Paris. Big red-headed brute. You remember him? And—who's the girl? But for her hair, I'd say it was Miss Saxham. By the Great Brass Hat, it is! With a wig, or dyed...."
"Dyed. It was done in Paris—done most beautifully." Margot's eyes had lighted up with interest. "I must have forgotten to tell you. I've known it three or four days. Don't you like it?"
"Like it?" Franky had reached for his little glass and gulped the contents hurriedly. "My stars, I never saw such a transformation. Order another Kümmel, please, to give me a buck-up."
"Take mine. I simply loathe the sticky stuff." She added, as Franky obliged: "I think that Pat looks ripping."
"All too ripping. That's where the trouble comes in." He went on: "When her hair was black, you knew where it was you'd seen her. Makin' one in an endless procession of women—all with long eyes and big busts and curving hips, walkin'—like pussy-cats along a roof-ridge, on the walls of those old Egyptian temples we did together—that November when I got such spoons on you—going up with the Gillinghams from Cairo to Philae—a flat-bottomed Nile tug towin' the whole crowd in a string of dahabeahs. You remember those ochre-coloured Nile sunrises? When a dust-storm had been blowin' over the Desert, and the River was all wrinkly white, like curdled milk."
"How killingly poetic!"
"Am I poetic? Good egg! Never thought I'd live to be called that."