Page:Angna Enters - Among the Daughters.djvu/330

 "I'm hungry, let's get our plates and sit with Figente," Lucy said to Ranna who, though he couldn't Charleston, didn't want her to dance it with anyone else. She would have liked to join Vermillion and Simone who were having a good time with Kevin Doyle but they didn't seem to care about having anyone else.

Plates in hand they were stopped by Horta Cornwallis. "I'm delighted to see you again, my dear. It seems we never meet except through Figente. Won't you and Ranna sit here with Nino and me?"

To Lucy's disappointment Ranna accepted for them.

"We meet again in quite different surroundings from the Archduke Michael's in Nice," Ranna said to the Marqués.

The Marqués looked at Lucy. "I prefer here where there is youth and hope to Michael's drawing room where one smells a dead world in the tarnished metal of his old Royal tapestries."

Horta Cornwallis, puzzled by nobility's rejection of royalty, withheld comment and pursued her quarry. "I was enchanted by your dance," she said ingratiatingly to Lucy and Ranna. "I am giving a ball at the Athenée on St. Valentine's Day for the benefit of the war orphans of France. Beman has promised to help. The Ambassador will be there. I would like you both to be my star attraction. Do come and see me next week and we'll talk about it."

I won't, thought Lucy, I won't become involved with her, even for charity. But before she could formulate a plausible excuse, Ranna accepted. I'll tell him to get me out of it when we're alone, she vowed distressed.

"Merry Christmas, Lucy," said Semy sidling up. "Isn't it a marvelous party? I wish I didn't have to make an early train to Washington in the morning," he went on, with obvious expectation of an introduction to Horta and the Marqués.

"You sit here, Semy," Lucy obliged, introducing him, and said "Excuse me, I have to speak to Figente."

Figente threw aside the scratching laurel wreath and tied his slipping toga about him bathrobe fashion. He observed the hootched-up conviviality with disgust. This was the last party of its kind he would give for such a horde of barbarians, and that new scourge, crashers. The women were the worst; grotesques, wriggling and ghastly under greasy makeup. Where was Hal? Where Damon? And poor Boswell, a naif, with Welford's no-good son. And Lucy, after all instruction, wasting her time on the Hindu. Why didn't everyone 318