“It is my birthday.  God and I alone know which one.  I drink to myself.  I wish myself good luck. Vive myself. Vive Gyp Labelle and all who ’ave loved ’er and love ’er and shall love ’er!”

She drank her wine to the last drop, and the band began to play again, knitting the broken, noisy congratulations into a kind of triumphal chorus.  It was very crude and theatrical and effective.  It did not matter, any more than it matters in a well-acted play, that the whole incident had been rehearsed.  It was as calculated and as spontaneous as that nightly, irresistible burst of laughter.

Rufus Cosgrave stood up shyly in his place.  Had he been dressed a shade less perfectly and resisted the gardenia in his button-hole, he would have been better disguised.  As it was, there could be no mistaking a little fellow from the suburbs who had got into bad company.  And in spite of the West Africa swamp and its peculiar forms of despairing vice, he was so frightfully innocent that he did not know it,

“And—­and we’re here to—­to wish you luck too—­that you go on—­as you are—­dancing and laughing—­making us all laugh and dance with you—­however down in the dumps we are—­for ever and ever—­and to bring you offerings—­for you to remember us by.”

There must have been a great deal more to it than that.  Stonehouse could see the notes clenched in one tense hand, but they had become indecipherable and he let them drop.  He came from his place, stumbling over the back of somebody’s chair, to where she stood, and laid a small square box done up in tissue paper at her side.  She laughed and caught him by the ear, and kissed him on both flaming cheeks.

“A precedent—­fair play for all!” the man opposite Stonehouse shouted.

They came then, one after another, treading on each other’s heels, and she waited for them, an audacious figure of Pleasure receiving custom, and kissed them, shading her kiss subtly so that each one became a secret little joke out of the past or lying in wait in the future, at which the rest could guess as they chose.  Some of the women whom she knew best joined in the stream.  They bore her, for the most part, an odd affinity and no ill-will.  They had set out on the same road and had failed, and their failure stared out of their crudely painted faces.  But perhaps they were grateful to her for not having forgotten them—­or for other more obscure reasons.  They gave her what they could—­extemporary gifts some of them—­a tawdry ring or a flower which she stuck jauntily among the outrageous feathers.  The significantly small parcels she did not open—­either from idle good nature or from sheer indifference.  Stonehouse wondered what Cosgrave’s little box contained.  Probably a year or two of the mosquito-infested swamp to which he would soon return to boast of this night’s extravaganza.

“And you, Monsieur le docteur?”

For he had gone on eating and drinking with apparent tranquillity.