Tom placed a box in her expectant hand. They were enormous hands: gaunt, naked, acquisitive, with a wrinkle about the finger-joints that was sinister against the smooth calm of her wrists. Behind her hands, Dounia Smith rose diminished. She was tall, handsomely cut: her hair swept black and low over her temples: her eyes had a gray slant that offset the thin lips, the sharp tilt of her chin. When she lighted her cigarette she showed all of her teeth. They were white. But as the gaunt huge hand came near her face, the rest of Dounia Smith went into eclipse.
A man came up, neatly and drably dressed, with a red tie that flared against the pale primness of his face.
“Glad you’re here, Rennard. Business particularly boring, to-day. Fun particularly needed, to-night.”
This was Christian Hill—sedate, rebellious—a man of business who craved intoxicants of life. All his sentences sounded like telegrams. All his money, too sanely earned in a broker’s office, was at the disposal of his search for madness. He looked on Tom as his ideal. He would have sold his wife into slavery for a lust sufficiently great to make him commit the folly.
“I want to introduce you,” he beckoned toward a girl that had sat yonder beside him. “Madeline—this is Mr. Rennard—Miss Gross.”
She came sidling. She was richly clad, very blond, very powdered. Beneath the simper of blue eyes, the hot curl of placid lips and the ringlets of blond hair teasing her tiny ear, Tom saw that she was Jewish.
He took her tiny hand, gloved in fawn-colored kid.
“It is nice to have you here, Miss Gross. I hope our rough manners won’t shock you.”
She propelled herself a little nearer.
“Oh, please do, Mr. Rennard!”