Paul listened with lazy amusement, when suddenly his friend touched his arm and exclaimed:
"Gad, there's a stunner!"
Paul looked towards the door and saw a slender young woman of twenty-three or four daringly gowned in pale orange and deep daffodil hued velvets and tulles. Her arms were bare. A long row of pearls gave employment to one over-manicured hand, while the other held a fan of yellow feathers and tortoise-shell which reached nearly to the ground. There was a specious sheen from the waves of her hair to the slippers that peeked from under trailing draperies. She was not beautiful, but there was a glint of pert humour in her wide eyes and tilted nose, a hint of generosity in her mouth, a self-assurance in her carriage that gave her a striking attractiveness. She had, in an amazing degree, the faculty of making other women appear dowdy, and it was obvious to Paul that she was boycotted. This was partly explained by the presence at her side of a fat, gouty-looking German-American Jew whose pearl shirt-stud and expensive cigar, while super-excellent of their kind, seemed to add vague injury to his companion's vague insult.
The young woman glanced nonchalantly but deliberately at the tables, and then turned toward the door again, displaying a low-cut bodice which created a silence on the terrace—half shocked, half admiring. She struck Paul as being splendidly but a little pathetically isolated; splendid, because she was so incongruously harmless. He was sure of that. He knew that type of face—it was the face of a "damn good sport." He seemed almost to know that particular face; it aroused some vague recollection. At any rate he meant to see it again, at closer range. He was all the more interested in her on account of the boycott; he entertained a perverse partiality for people who were snubbed.
Before the young woman disappeared through the
