, drink _and_ be merry.
People greeted Lady Cecily as she passed them and muttered, "'loa,
Jimphy!" Henry had never been to a fashionable restaurant before, and
the barbaric beauty of the scene fascinated him. The women were
riotously dressed, and the colours of their garments mingled and merged
like the colours of a sunset. There was a constant flow of people
through the room, and the chatter of animated voices and bursts of
laughter and the jingling, sentimental music played by the orchestra
made Jimphy forget how bored he had been at the theatre. The slightly
fuddled air which he had had in the bar of St. James's had left him and
he began to talk.

"Ripping woman, that!" he said to Henry, indicating a slight, dark girl
who had entered the restaurant in company with a tall, flaxen-haired
man. "Pretty little flapper, I call her! I like thin women, myself.
Well, slender's a better word, isn't it? What you say, Cecily?"

Lady Cecily had tapped her husband's arm. "Ernest Lensley's just come
in," she said. "He's with Boltt. Go and bring them both here. They can't
find seats, poor dears!"

Ernest Lensley and Boltt were fashionable novelists. Lensley was an
impudent-looking man with very blue eyes who had written a number of
popular stories about society women who "chattered" very much in the way
that Lady Cecily chattered. The heroine of his best-known book was
modelled, so people said, on the wife of a Cabinet Minister, and
thousands of suburban Englishwomen professed to have an intimate
knowledge of the statesman's family life solely because they had read
Lensley's novel. It was a flippant, vulgar book, the outcome of a
flippant, vulgar mind. Boltt had a wider public than Lensley. Boltt, a
tall, thin, stooping man, with peering eyes, had discovered "the human
note" of which Gilbert's editor prated continually. He was a precise,
priggish man, extraordinarily vain though no vainer than Lensley, who,
however, had an easy manner that Boltt would never acquire. He spoke in
the way in which one might expect a "reduced gentlewoman, poor dear!" to
speak, and there was something about him that made a man long to kick
him up a room and down a room and across a room and back again. His
heroes were all big, burly, red-haired giants, who wore beards and old
clothes and said "By God, yes!" when they admired the scenery, and led
a vagabond life in a perfectly gentlemanly manner until they met the
heroine.... His heroines constantly f