“Oh, no!  I shall like it very much.”

“You’ve been up against life!” murmured Tommy in a melting voice, gazing at her.  “But how wonderful all experience is, isn’t it.  I once had a husband.  We separated—­at least, he separated.  But I know the feel of being a wife.”

Audrey blushed deeply.  She wanted to push away all that sympathy, and she was exceedingly alarmed by the revelation that Tommy was an initiate.  The widow was the merest schoolgirl once more.  But her blush had saved her from a chat in which she could not conceivably have held her own.

“Excuse me being so clumsy,” said Tommy contritely.  “Another time.”  And she waved her cigarette to the waiter in demand for the bill.

It was after the orchestra had finished a tango, and while Tommy was examining the bill, that the first violin and leader, in a magenta coat, approached the table, and with a bow offered his violin deferentially to Musa.  Many heads turned to watch what would happen.  But Musa only shrugged his shoulders and with an exquisite gesture of refusal signified that he had to leave.  Whereupon the magenta coat gracefully retired, starting a Hungarian dance as he went.

“Musa is supposed to be the greatest violinist in Paris—­perhaps in the world,” Tommy whispered casually to Audrey.  “He used to play here, till Dauphin discovered him.”

Audrey, overcome by this prodigious blow, trembled at the contemplation of her blind stupidity.

Beyond question, Musa now looked extremely important, vivid, masterful.  She had been mistaking him for a nice, ornamental, useless boy.

CHAPTER X

FANCY DRESS

Just as the cafe-restaurant had been an intensification of ordinary life, so was the ball in Dauphin’s studio an intensification of the cafe-restaurant.  It had more colour, more noise, more music, more heat, more varied kinds of people, and, of course, far more riotous movement than the cafe-restaurant.  The only quality in which the cafe-restaurant stood first was that of sustenance.  Monsieur Dauphin had not attempted to rival the cafe-restaurant in the matter of food and drink.  And that there was no general hope of his doing so could be deduced from the fact that many of the more experienced guests arrived with bottles, fruit, sausages, and sandwiches of their own.

When Audrey and her friends entered the precincts of the vast new white building in the Boulevard Raspail, upon whose topmost floor Monsieur Dauphin painted the portraits of the women of the French, British, and American plutocracies and aristocracies, a lift full of gay-coloured figures was just shooting upwards past the wrought-iron balustrades of the gigantic staircase.  Tommy and Nick stopped to speak to a columbine who hovered between the pavement and the threshold of the house.

“I don’t know whether it’s the grenadine or the lobster, or whether it’s Paris,” said Miss Ingate confidentially in the interval; “but I can scarcely tell whether I’m standing on my head or my heels.”