She drank the whole glass at one draught, and sat down at some distance from the table, with her head bent forward, and her hands clasped over her knees. Owinski took a seat close beside her.
“Czolhanski,” he told us, “has only just got through his critique of the leading actress in to-night’s play. We had to stay for him in the editor’s waiting-room.”
“Ah,” grumbled the critic, “it’s beastly, this work all done to order and at railway speed! Such a piece as that ought to be thought over till it is possible to form a definite judgment upon it. As it is, we are forced to save the situation by means of a lot of sententious generalities.”
At last, Madame Wildenhoff arrived with her husband. At the unexpected sight of Imszanski in our company, a deep blush mantled her face. She seated herself next to Gina, and burst into a fit of chuckling, shading her eyes with beautiful hands that carried many a ring. All this was rather unusual and disquieting. Imszanski flushed slightly; a warm haze, so thin that it could scarce be seen, bedimmed his eyes, and his long lashes drooped over them.
Wildenhoff, an unpleasant cut-and-dried sort of man, whose humour inclined to sarcastic silence, proposed that we should pass into a private room. She protested.
“Oh, no! I dearly love noise and music and an uproar all about me. We had better stay here, hadn’t we?”
Wildenhoff smiled at his wife and was presently deep in study of the bill of fare.
She again set to laughing without any cause: a disquieting sort of chuckle, with something like a sob now and then.
I glanced at the two couples, feeling a twinge of envy. “There is love between them.” ...
Oh, but all that was so very, very long ago!