delicacy and grandeur, of the child and the woman. Her hands were long, brown, and narrow, the fingers long and delicate, the bones as fine and small as a bird’s, and yet they were strong, sensitive, able-looking hands as well. Her arms were long and slender, as firm and delicate as a young girl’s, but Eugene noted that her breasts were not round and firm, but the long heavy sloping breasts of a big woman. When she got up to dance with Starwick she topped him by a head, and yet, radiant with a joy and happiness she had never known before, she seemed to float there in his arms, an Amazonian figure, great of thigh and limb and breast, and a creature of a loveliness as delicate and radiant as a child’s.
They danced superbly together: in deference to Starwick, the orchestra played his “Chile Bon Bon” song again; when they returned to the table Starwick’s ruddy face was flushed with the emotion the song always aroused in him, his eyes looked wet, and in a high, passionate, almost womanish tone, he cried to Eugene:
“God! Isn’t it grand! Isn’t it simply superb! It’s one of the great songs of the world; it really is, you know! The thing has the same quality as a great primitive—the same quality as a primitive Apollo or Cimabue’s Madonna, in the Louvre. Christ!” he cried in a high womanish tone, “the whole thing’s there—it really is! I think it’s the greatest song that was ever written!”
He poured out a glass of champagne, cold and sparkling, and drank it thirstily, his eyes wet, his face flushed deeply with his feeling.
LXXIX
In the dull grey light of the short and swiftly waning winter’s day, the two young men were leaving the museum, to spend the rest of the afternoon until the time of their appointed meeting with the women, in drink and talk at one of the innumerable and seductive cafés of the magic city. Outside the Louvre, they hailed a taxi and were driven swiftly over one of the bridges of the Seine, through the narrow streets of the Latin Quarter, and at length stopped and got out before La Closerie des Lilas, where they were to meet the two women later on.
They spent the remainder of the afternoon in the chill wintry air of the terrace, warm with drink, with argument or discussion, and with the gaiety of life and voices of people all around them, the pageant of life that passed for ever on the street before them—all that priceless, rare, and
