“Am I late for Gebhardt?” she asked, as if Life itself hinged upon the reply.
A quietly silly woman, Madame Ruiz was often obliged to lament the absence of intellect at her door: accounting for it as the consequence of a weakness for negroes, combined with a hopeless passion for the Regius Professor of Greek at Oxford.
But the strident cries of the dancers, and the increasing volume of the music, discouraged all talk, though ladies with collection-boxes (biding their time) were beginning furtively to select their next quarry.
Countess Katty Taosay, née Soderini, a little woman and sure of the giants, could feel in her psychic veins which men were most likely to empty their pockets: English Consul ... pale and interesting, he not refuse to stoop and fumble, nor Follinsbe “Peter,” the slender husband of a fashionable wife, or Charlie Campfire, a young boy like an injured camel, heir to vast banana estates, the darling, and six foot high if an inch.
“Why do big men like little women?” she wondered, waving a fan powdered with blue paillettes: and she was still casting about for a reason, when the hectic music stopped.
And now the room echoed briefly with applause, while admiration was divided between the superexcellence of the dancers, and the living beauty of the rugs which their feet had trod—rare rugs from Bokhara-i-Shareef, and Kairouan-city-of-Prayer, lent by the mistress of the house.
Entering on the last hand-clap, Mr. and Mrs. Mouth, followed by their daughters, felt, each, in their several ways, they might expect to enjoy themselves.
“Prancing Nigger, what a furore!” Mrs. Mouth exclaimed. “You b’lieb, I hope, now, dat our tickets was worth de money.”
Plucking at the swallow-tails of an evening “West-End,” Mr. Mouth was disinclined to reopen a threadbare topic.
“It queah how few neegah dair be,” he observed, scanning the brilliant audience, many of whom, taking advantage of an interval, were flocking towards a buffet in an adjoining conservatory.