place.
There he stood with her in a dramatic isolation, but so great was the
carrying power of her mystery that he did not feel himself a fool. It
was quite natural to be there for some unknown purpose, at one with her
and that warmly breathing mass: for no purpose, perhaps, save that they
were all human and meant the same thing, a general good-will. She went
on speaking, and Jeffrey knew there was fire in her words. He bent to
the interpreter beside the car and asked, at the man's ear:

"What is she saying?"

The interpreter turned and looked him in the face. They were not more
than three inches apart, and Jeffrey, gazing into the passionate black
eyes, tasting, as it were, the odour of the handsome creature and
feeling his breath, was not repelled, but had a sudden shyness before
him, as if the man's opinion of him were an attack on his inmost self,
an attack of adoring admiration.

"What is she saying?" he repeated, and for answer the interpreter
snatched one of Jeff's hands and seemed about to kiss it.

"For God's sake, don't do that," Jeff heard himself saying, and withdrew
his hand and straightened at a safe distance from the adoring face, and
he heard Madame Beattie going on in her fiery periods. Whatever she was
saying, they loved it, loved it to the point of madness. They cheered
her, and the interpreter did not check them, but cheered too. To Jeffrey
it was all a medley of strange thoughts. Here he was, in the crowd and
not of it, greatly moved and yet not as the others were, because he did
not understand. And though the voice and the answering enthusiasm went
on for a long time, and still he did not understand, he was not tired
but exhilarated only. The moon, the drifting clouds, the dramatic voice
playing upon the hearts of the multitude, their hot responses, all this
gave him a sense of augmented life and the feel of his own past youth.
Suddenly he fancied Madame Beattie's voice failed a little; something
ebbed in it, not so much force as quality.

"That's all," she said, in a quick aside to him. "Let's go." She gave an
order, in English now, and a figure started out of the crowd and cranked
the car.

"We can't go in this," Jeffrey said to her. "This is Moore's car."

But Madame Beattie had seated herself majestically. Her feathers even
were portentous in the moonlight, like the plumage of some gigantic
bird. She gave another order, whereupon the man who had cranked the
machine took his place in it