most of them had golden or vivid red hair, though a
few tables off Victoria could see a tall woman of colour with black hair
stiffened by wax and pierced with massive ivory combs. They mostly wore
low-necked dresses, many of them white or faintly tinted with blue or
pink. She could see a dark Italian-looking girl in scarlet from whose
ears long coral earrings drooped to her slim cream-coloured shoulders.
There was an enormously stout woman with puffy pink cheeks, strapped
slightly into a white silk costume, looking like a rose at the height of
its bloom. There were others too! short dark women with tight hair;
minxish French faces and little shrewd dark eyes; florid Dutch and
Belgian women with massive busts and splendid shoulders, dazzlingly
white; English girls too, most of them slim with long arms and rosy
elbows and faintly outlined collar bones. Many of these had the
aristocratic nonchalance of 'art' photographs. Opposite Victoria, under
the other chandelier, a splendid creature, white as a lily, with
flashing green eyes, copper coloured hair, had thrown herself back in
her armchair and was laughing at a man's joke. Her head was bent back,
and as she laughed her splendid bust rose and fell and her throat filled
out. An elderly man with a close clipped grey moustache, immaculate in
his well-cut dress clothes, leaned towards her with a smile on his brown
face.

Victoria turned her eyes away from the man, (a soldier, of course), and
looked at the others. They, too, were a mixed collection. There were a
good many youths, all clean shaven and mostly well-groomed; these talked
loudly to their partners and seemed to fill the latter with merriment;
now and then they stared at other women with the boldness of the shy.
There were elderly men too; a few in frock coats in spite of the heat,
some very stout and red, some bald and others half concealing their
scalps under cunning hair arrangements. The elderly men sat mostly with
two women, some with three, and lay back smiling like courted pachas. By
far the greater number of the guests, however, were anything between
thirty and forty; and seemed to cover every type from the smart young
captain with the tanned face, bold blue eyes and a bristly moustache, to
ponderous men in tweeds or blue reefer jackets who looked about them
with a mixture of nervousness and bovine stolidity.

From every corner came a steady stream of loud talk; continually little
shrieks of laughter pierced