guests arrived with bottles, fruit, sausages, and
sandwiches of their own.

When Audrey and her friends entered the precincts of the vast new white
building in the Boulevard Raspail, upon whose topmost floor Monsieur
Dauphin painted the portraits of the women of the French, British, and
American plutocracies and aristocracies, a lift full of gay-coloured
figures was just shooting upwards past the wrought-iron balustrades of the
gigantic staircase. Tommy and Nick stopped to speak to a columbine who
hovered between the pavement and the threshold of the house.

"I don't know whether it's the grenadine or the lobster, or whether it's
Paris," said Miss Ingate confidentially in the interval; "but I can
scarcely tell whether I'm standing on my head or my heels."

Before the Americans rejoined them, the lift had returned and ascended with
another covey of fancy costumes, including a man with a nose a foot long
and a girl with bright green hair, dressed as an acrobat. On its next
journey the lift held Tommy and Nick's party, and it held no more.

When the party emerged from it, they were greeted with a cheer, hoarse and
half human, by a band of light amateur mountebanks of both sexes who were
huddled in a doorway. Within a quarter of an hour Audrey and Miss Ingate,
after astounding struggles in a dressing-room in which Nick alone saved
their lives and reputations, appeared in Japanese disguise according to
promise, and nobody could tell whether Audrey was maid, wife, or widow. She
might have been a creature created on the spot, for the celestial purpose
of a fancy-dress ball in Monsieur Dauphin's studio.

The studio was very large and rather lofty. Its walls had been painted by
gifted pupils of Monsieur Dauphin and by fellow-artists, with scenes of
life according to Catullus, Theocritus, Propertius, Martial, Petronius, and
other classical writers. It is not too much to say that the walls of the
studio constituted a complete novelty for Audrey and Miss Ingate. Miss
Ingate opened her mouth to say something, but, saying nothing, forgot for a
long time to shut it again.

Chinese lanterns, electrically illuminated, were strung across the studio
at a convenient height so that athletic dancers could prodigiously leap up
and make them swing. Beneath this incoherent but exciting radiance the
guests swayed and glided, in a joyous din, under the influence of an
orchestra of men snouted like pigs and raised on a dais. In a corner was a