By the time she had obtained her recipe and cajoled a few special shoots from various exotic plants, the sun had begun to decline. Emerging from the palace by a postern-gate, where lounged a sentry, she found herself almost directly beneath the great acacias on the Promenade. Under the lofty leafage of the trees, as usual towards this hour, society, in its varying grades had congregated to be gazed upon. Mounted on an eager-headed little horse his Weariness (who loved being seen) was plying up and down, while in his wake a “screen artiste,” on an Arabian mare with powdered withers and eyes made up with kohl, was creating a sensation. Every time she used her whip the powder rose in clouds. Wending her way through the throng the duchess recognised the rose-harnessed horses of Countess Medusa Rappa—the Countess bolt upright, her head carried stiffly staring with a pathetic expression of dead joie-de-vie between her coachman’s and footman’s waists. But the intention of calling at the Café Cleopatra caused the duchess to hasten. The possibility of learning something beneficial to herself was a lure not to be resisted. Pausing to allow the marvellous blue automobile of Count Ann-Jules to pass (with the dancer Kalpurnia inside), she crossed the Avenue, where there seemed, on the whole, to be fewer people. Here she remarked a little ahead of her the masculine form of the Countess Yvorra, taking a quiet stroll before Salut in the company of her Confessor. In the street she usually walked with her hands clasped behind her back, huddled up like a statesman: “Des choses abominables!... Des choses hors nature!” she was saying, in tones of evident relish, as the duchess passed.
Meanwhile Madame Wetme was seated anxiously by the samovar in her drawing-room. To receive the duchess, she had assumed a mashlak à la mode, whitened her face and rouged her ears, and set a small, but costly aigrette at an insinuating angle in the edifice of her hair. As the hour of Angelus approached, the tension of waiting grew more and more acute, and beneath the strain of expectation even the little iced-sugar cakes upon the tea-table looked green with worry.
Suppose, after all, she shouldn’t come? Suppose she had already left? Suppose she were in prison? Only the other day a woman of the highest fashion, a leader of “society” with an A, had served six months as a consequence of her extravagance....
In agitation Madame Wetme helped herself to a small glassful of Cointreau, (her favourite liqueur) when, feeling calmer for the consommation, she was moved to take a peep out of Antoine.
But nobody chic at all met her eye.
Between the oleanders upon the curb, that rose up darkly against a flame-pink sky, two young men dressed “as Poets” were arguing and gesticulating freely over a bottle of beer. Near them, a sailor with a blue drooping collar and dusty boots (had he walked, poor wretch, to see his mother?) was gazing stupidly at the large evening gnats that revolved like things bewitched about the café lamps. While below the window a lean soul in glasses, evidently an impresario, was loudly exclaiming: “London has robbed me of my throat, sir!! It has deprived me of my voice.”
No, an “off” night certainly!
Through a slow, sun-flower of a door (that kept on revolving long after it had been pushed) a few military men bent on a game of billiards, or an early fille de joie (only the discreetest des filles “serieuses” were supposed to be admitted)—came and went.
“To-night they’re fit for church,” Madame Wetme complacently smiled as the door swung round again: “Navy-blue and silver-fox looks the goods,” she reflected, “upon any occasion! It suggests something sly—like a Nurse’s uniform.”
“A lady in the drawing-room, Madame, desires to speak to you,” a chasseur tunefully announced, and fingering nervously her aigrette Madame Wetme followed.