The butler brought him an evil mixture. Gurdy emptied it into the fireplace and leaned on the pool table wondering what Margot had expected. It didn’t matter, of course. Yet she might recall him as a sixteen year old schoolboy much absorbed in polevaults and stiff with conceit for some acquirements in English letters. How people changed and how foolish it was to be surprised at change! Sophomoric. Mark really knew a pretty woman when he saw one. A man of genuine taste outside the selection of plays.—She must know London expertly. She must have a sense of spectacle. She must meet all conditions with this liberal, successful woman as a guide. If she wanted a pastel made for Mark she should have it. Gurdy dusted chalk from his leggings, evenly taped about the long strength of his calves, strolled into the drawing room and played the languid movement of the Faun’s Afternoon. Illusory or not there was always beauty in the blended exterior of things. A man should turn from the inner crassness to soothe himself with the fair investiture, with the drift of delicate motions that went in colour and music.—Olive thought him like Mark as she came in. She was worried because Gail had written of meeting the boy on Montmartre.
“You’ve been enjoying Paris?”
“More or less. It’s a holy show, just now. I don’t suppose the barkeepers—and other parasites—will ever have such a chance again.”
“I hope you’ve not been in too much mischief. Ian Gail wrote me that he met you in some horrid hole or other.”
“A party at Ariana Joyce’s. I wasn’t doing any more harm there than the rest of the Allied armies. But it was pretty odious.” The memory jarred into the present satisfaction. He halted his long fingers on the keys and Margot came rustling in, her gown of sheer black muslin painted with yellow flowers and gold combs in her hair.
“Were you playing L’Après Midi?—And he’s only twenty, Olive! Most Americans don’t rise to respectable music until they’ve lost all their money and have to come and live over here. Any nails in your shoes, Gurdy? We’re going to a dance.”
“Where?” asked Olive.
“Something for war widows at Mrs. Rossiter-Rossiter-Rossiter’s—that fat woman from Victoria. I promised some one or other I’d come. We’ll go in time for supper.”
The charity dance seemed less fevered than dances in Paris. There were ranks of matrons about the walls of a dull, long room. At midnight Margot rescued him from a girl who was using him as an introduction to American economics and found a single table in the supper hall. Here the batter of ill played ragtime was endurable and the supping folk entertained him.
“The country’s so ghastly with houses shut and no servants that most people have stuck to town,” Margot said, refusing wine. “Lot of eminences here. Who’re you looking at?”