to a young girl.
Old rose and young rose mingled delicately in the silks and gauzes
of her gown; here and there a topaz flashed rose from her bodice and
from the dusk of her bared neck. There was a fine dusk in her
whiteness and in the rose of her face, and in the purplish streaks
under her eyes, and deeper dusks about the roots of her hair. And
gold sprang out of her darkness there; gold and bronze and copper
gleamed and glowed and flamed on every coil and curl. Her eyes held
the light gloriously; they were of a luminous, tawny brown, wide
apart, and slightly round, with a sudden fineness at the corners.
The lids had thick black lashes, so short that when they drooped
they had the effect of narrowing her eyes without darkening them.
Her nose, small and straight, was a shade too broadly rounded at the
tip, but that defect gave a sort of softness to her splendor. Of her
mouth Thesiger could not judge; he hadn't seen it at rest; and when
she talked her white teeth flashed at him and disturbed him.

As he looked at her, disturbed, and he hoped, disturbing, he
thought of little Vera Walters, of her slender virginal body, of her
small virginal face, smooth, firm, and slightly pointed like a bud,
of her gray eyes, clear as water, and of the pale gold and fawn of
her hair. He thought of her tenderness and of her cruelty. He caught
himself frowning at it over the _mousse de volaille_ he was eating;
and just then he thought that the other woman who was looking at him
smiled. Most certainly she gazed.

The gaze was condoned and allowed by the two men who followed it.

She was superb; but the men, the men were awful. To begin with, they
were American, altogether too American for Thesiger. One, whom the
lady addressed with some ceremony as Mr. Tarbuck, was the big, full
type, florid, rough-hewn, civilized by the cut of his clothes and
the excessive cleanness of his shaving. From the first he had
oppressed and offended Thesiger by his large and intolerably genial
presence. The other, whom she familiarly and caressingly called
Binky, was small and lean and yellow; he had a young face with old,
nervous lines in it, the twitching, tortured lines of the victim of
premature high pressure, effete in one generation. The small man
drank, most distinctly and disagreeably he drank. He might have been
the wreck of saloon bars, or of the frequent convivial cocktail, or
of savage, solitary drinking.

The lady seemed to be traveling under T