A dull red crept under the banker's yellow skin, giving him a suffused appearance.
'You are very emphatic.'
'The occasion surely warrants emphasis.'
The rooms were by now quite full. Little centres of laughter had formed themselves, and were distinguishable. Alexander Christopoulos had once boasted that he could, merely by looking round a room and arguing from the juxtaposition of conversationalists, give a fairly accurate résumé of what every one was saying. He also claimed to tell from the expression of the Danish Excellency whether she was or was not arriving primed with a new epigram. He was now at the side of the Danish Excellency, fat, fair, and foolish, but good-natured, and having a fund of veritable humanity which was lacking in most of her colleagues. The careful English of Alexander reached his father's ears through the babel,—
'The Empress Eugénie set the fashion of wearing décolleté in the shape the water in your bath makes round your shoulders....'
Lafarge went on,—
'The Davenants are sly; they keep apart; they mix with us, but they do not mingle. They are like oil upon water. Where is William Davenant now, do you know?'
'He is just arriving,' said Christopoulos.
Lafarge saw him then, bowing over his hostess's hand, polite, but with absent eyes that perpetually strayed from the person he was talking to. Behind him came a tall, loose-limbed boy, untidy, graceful; he glanced at the various groups, and the women looked at him with interest. A single leap might carry him at any moment out of the room in which his presence seemed so incongruous.
The tall mirrors on the walls sent back the reflection of the many candles, and in them the same spectral company came and went that moved and chattered in the rooms.