Then they crossed the sombre, lamp-reflecting Seine, and soon afterwards the two taxis stopped at a vast black door in a very wide street of serried palatial facades that were continually shaken by the rushing tumult of electric cars.  Tommy jumped out and pushed a button, and the door automatically split in two, disclosing a vast and dim tunnel.  Tommy ran within, and came out again with a coatless man in a black-and-yellow striped waistcoat and a short white apron.  This man, Musa, and the two chauffeurs entered swiftly into a complex altercation, which endured until Audrey had paid the chauffeurs and all the trunks had been transported behind the immense door and the door bangingly shut.

“Vehy amusing, isn’t it?” whispered Miss Ingate caustically to Audrey.  “Aren’t they dears?”

“Madame Dubois’s establishment is on the third and fourth floors,” said Nick.

They climbed a broad, curving, carpeted staircase.

“We’re here,” said Audrey to Miss Ingate after scores of stairs.

Miss Ingate, breathless, could only smile.

And Audrey profoundly felt that she was in Paris.  The mere shape of the doorknob by the side of a brass plate lettered “Madame Dubois” told her that she was in an exotic land.

And in the interior of Madame Dubois’s establishment Tommy and Nick together drew apart the curtains, opened the windows, and opened the shutters of a pleasantly stuffy sitting-room.  Everybody leaned out, and they saw the superb thoroughfare, straight and interminable, and the moving roofs of the tram-cars, and dwarfs on the pavements.  The night was mild and languorous.

“You see that!” Nick pointed to a blaze of electricity to the left on the opposite side of the road.  “That’s where we shall take you to dine, after you’ve spruced yourselves up.  You needn’t bother about fancy dress.  Monsieur Dauphin always has stacks of kimonos—­for his models, you know.”

While the travellers spruced themselves up in different bedrooms, Tommy chattered through one pair of double doors ajar, and Nick through the other, and Musa strummed with many mistakes on an antique Pleyel piano.  And as Audrey listened to the talk of these acquaintances, Tommy and Nick, who in half an hour had put on the hue of her lifelong friends, and as she heard the piano, and felt the vibration of cars far beneath, she decided that she was still growing happier and happier, and that life and the world were marvellous.

A little later they passed into the cafe-restaurant through a throng of seated sippers who were spread around its portals like a defence.  The interior, low, and stretching backwards, apparently endless, into the bowels of the building, was swimming in the brightest light.  At a raised semicircular counter in the centre two women were enthroned, plump, sedate, darkly dressed, and of middle age.  To these priestesses came a constant succession of waiters, in the classic garb of waiters, bearing trays which they offered to the gaze of the women, and afterwards throwing down coins that rang on the marble of the counter.  One of the women wrote swiftly in a great tome.  Both of them, while performing their duties, glanced continually into every part of the establishment, watching especially each departure and each arrival.