“Well, the devil has a pleasant way with him, there’s no denying it!  Come and find a seat!  The next will be one of the special dances—­a can-can or a Spanish dance.  I’d like you to see it.”

“Who will dance it?”

“Who?  Oh, probably, if it’s the can-can, half a dozen of the best-looking of those girls with the elaborate lingerie.  They’re paid to dance here.  They’re part of the show.”

“I see!” Max was interested, but his voice did not sound very certain.  “And the others?” he added.  “That fair girl, for example, sitting at the table with the hideous, untidy little man in the brown suit?”

Blake’s eyes sought out the couple.  “What!  The two smiling into each other’s eyes?  Those, my boy, are true citizens of the true Bohemia.  She is probably a little dressmaker’s assistant, whose whole available capital is sunk in that Pierrot hat and those pretty shoes; and he—­well, he might be anything with that queer, clever head!  But he’s probably a poet, in the guise of a journalist, picking up a few francs when he can and where he can.  A precarious existence, but lived in Elysium!  Wish I were twenty—­and unanalytical!  Come along!  It’s to be a Spanish dance.  You mustn’t miss it!”

They made their way forward, pushing toward the open space, upon which a shaft of limelight had been thrown, the better to display the faces and figures of eight Spanish women who, dressed in their national costume, stood preening themselves like vain birds, tossing their heads and showing their white teeth in sudden smiles of recognition to their friends among the audience.  While Max’s interested eyes were travelling from one face to another, the signal was given, and with an electric spontaneity the dance began.  It was a wonderful dance—­a dance of sensuous contortion crossed and arrested at every moment by the fierce flash of pride, the swift gesture of contempt indicative of the land that had conceived it—­a dance that would diminish to the merest sway of the body accompanied by the slow, hypnotic enticement of half-closed eyes, and then, as a fan might shut or open, leap back in an instant to a barbaric frenzy of motion in which loosened hair and flaming draperies carried the beholder’s senses upon a tide of intoxication.

Max was conscious of quickened heart-beats and flushed cheeks as the dancers paused and the high, shrill call that indicated an encore pierced through the smoke-laden air; and without question he turned and followed Blake to one of the many tables standing in the shadow of the galleries.

The table was packed tightly between other tables, and in the moment of intoxication he had no glance to spare for his neighbors.  Even Blake’s voice when it came to him sounded far away and impersonal.

“Sit down, boy!  What will you drink?”

“What you drink, mon ami, I will drink.”

He sat down and, with a new exuberance, threw himself back in his seat.  It was a moment of bravado that reckoned not at all with circumstance; his gesture was imperiously reckless, the space about him was crowded to suffocation; by a natural sequence of events his head came into sharp contact with the waving plumes of a hat at the table behind him.