"A Yankee from Chile," said I, bowing.
She looked clean through me at Thusis.
"I've seen that woman somewhere," she said without emotion. "I'll recollect where, presently."
But my eyes and attention were now focussed on the lovely Thusis and I paid no further heed to this bad-tempered Hohenzollern.
Never have I seen such an exquisite dance, such grace, such loveliness. As for the boches, when Thusis ended her Dance of the Sea, they were like a herd of cattle galloping around her and bellowing their satisfaction.
Tino, drunk and prodigal, began to throw handfuls of gold at Thusis, and, enraged, I caught him by the collar and jerked him onto a chair.
"Where the devil do you think you are—in the Coulisse of the Opera?" I cried in his partly deafened ear.
But he only grinned and wagged his head and attempted to fish more gold out of his pockets. But now his thrifty wife interfered and she ordered Secretary Gizzler to pick up every coin. Then she hissed something into Tino's car which seemed to galvanize that partly soused monarch so that he found his feet with alacrity and suffered himself to be led aside by his tight-lipped spouse.
From time to time during the festivities I had heard distant significant noises indicating that upstairs the Bolsheviki were not enduring sheep-dip and imprisonment with resignation.
Once I had slipped away to the corridor outside their quarters, but, when I made my presence known, Raoul from within calmly assured me that the delousing was progressing successfully and that he did not require my assistance.