“They join us, Hotel Rajah. It will be, I trust, an amusing evening.”
About midnight, dinner merged noisily into supper in the private dining room reserved by Mr. Puma for himself and guests at the new Hotel Rajah.
There had been intermittent dancing during the dinner, but now the negro jazz specialists had been dismissed with emoluments, and a music-box substituted; and supper promised to become even a more lively repetition of the earlier banquet.
Puma was superb––a large, heavy man, he danced as lightly as any ballerina; and he and Tessa Barclay did a Paraguayan dance together, with a leisurely and agile perfection of execution that elicited uproarious demonstrations from the others.
Not a whit winded, Puma resumed his seat at table, laughing as Mr. Pawling insisted on shaking hands with him.
“You are far too kind to my poor accomplishments,” he said in deprecation. “It was not at all difficult, that Paraguayan dance.”
“It was art!” insisted Mr. Pawling, his watery eyes brimming with emotion. And he pressed the pretty waist of Tessa Barclay.
“Art,” rejoined Puma, laying a jewelled hand on his shirt-front, “is an ecstatic outburst from within, like the song of the bird. Art is simple; art is not difficult. Where effort begins, art ends. Where self-expression becomes a labour, art already has perished!”
He thumped his shirt-front with an impassioned and highly-coloured fist.