There was a crush on the floor—too many dancing in the beginning—and all he could do was to prowl along the side lines. In a lower-tier box he noticed a fat youth, easily recognizable as Bacchus. His wreath of wax grapes he wore rakishly over one eye; he sat at a table with several thirsty dryads and bestowed impartial caresses and champagne. Occasionally he burst into throaty song in praise of the grape.
"Harry Belter!" cried Cleland.
"Hey! Who?" demanded Bacchus, leaning over the edge of the box, his glass suspended. "No! It isn't Jim Cleland! I won't believe it! It's only a yearned-for vision come to plague and torment me in my old age——!" He got up, leaned over and seized Cleland by his silken sabre-belt:
"Jim! It is you! To my arms, old scout——!" embracing him vociferously. "Welcome, dear argonaut! Ladies! Prepare to blush and tremble with pleasurable emotion!" he cried, turning to his attendant dryads. "This is my alter ego, James Cleland—my beloved comrade in villainy—my incomparable breaker of feminine hearts! You all shall adore him. You shall dote upon him. Ready! Attention! Dote!"
"I'm doting like mad," said a bright-eyed dryad, looking down invitingly at the handsome young fellow. "Only if he's a Turk I simply won't stand for a harem!"
"In the Prophet's Paradise," said Cleland, laughing, "there's no marriage or giving in marriage. Will you take a chance, pretty dryad? All the girls are on an equal footing in the Paradise of Mahomet, and we Caliphs just saunter from houri to houri and tell each that she's the only one!"
"Saunter this way, please," cried another youthful dryad, adjusting the wreath of water-lilies so that she could more effectively use her big dark eyes on him.
Belter whispered:
"They're from the new show—'Can You Beat It!'—just opened to record business. Better pick one while the picking's good. Come on up!"
But Cleland merely lingered to pay his compliments a few moments longer, then, declining to enter the box and join Belter in vocal praise of the grape, and eluding that gentleman's fond clutch, he dodged and slipped away to continue his quest of the silken, slender Sâkya girl somewhere engulfed amid all this glitter, surging, beating noisily around him.