Page:Meanwhile (1927).pdf/111

 "Doesn't your pride ever feel anything?" asked Grover.

"What do you mean, pride! I make at least one woman out of every ten, and I call ten per cent damn good business! Ho hit's the rich wot 'as the pleasures—"

After dinner they progressed by easy stages, each stage an oasis, to the other side of Paris, coming to a terminus at the Bal Tabarin. Next day Grover had a confused recollection of pink lights, a great blare of music that was tossed from one orchestra to another with merciless continuity, a slippery floor over which five Harvard men, himself included, had belied their hard-earned culture once and for all by lurching through a ring-a-round-of-roses that scattered narrowbooted men and gaudy women to right and left and brought from a man who introduced himself as the Management a waspish threat of gendarmes. A hundred per cent American interruption, in which if none of the five participants could be said to take any pride, they all, at the moment, took delirious pleasure, a pleasure converted into ecstasy by the poisonous shower of Gallic arrows it evoked.

Somewhat before dawn a pair of waiters, after a frigid but excessively polite discussion, maintained that Grover was obligated for two bottles of champagne ordered by a thin young woman in a dress that