ue citizens of the true Bohemia. She
is probably a little dressmaker's assistant, whose whole available
capital is sunk in that Pierrot hat and those pretty shoes; and
he--well, he might be anything with that queer, clever head! But he's
probably a poet, in the guise of a journalist, picking up a few francs
when he can and where he can. A precarious existence, but lived in
Elysium! Wish I were twenty--and unanalytical! Come along! It's to be a
Spanish dance. You mustn't miss it!"

They made their way forward, pushing toward the open space, upon which a
shaft of limelight had been thrown, the better to display the faces and
figures of eight Spanish women who, dressed in their national costume,
stood preening themselves like vain birds, tossing their heads and
showing their white teeth in sudden smiles of recognition to their
friends among the audience. While Max's interested eyes were travelling
from one face to another, the signal was given, and with an electric
spontaneity the dance began. It was a wonderful dance--a dance of
sensuous contortion crossed and arrested at every moment by the fierce
flash of pride, the swift gesture of contempt indicative of the land
that had conceived it--a dance that would diminish to the merest sway of
the body accompanied by the slow, hypnotic enticement of half-closed
eyes, and then, as a fan might shut or open, leap back in an instant to
a barbaric frenzy of motion in which loosened hair and flaming draperies
carried the beholder's senses upon a tide of intoxication.

Max was conscious of quickened heart-beats and flushed cheeks as the
dancers paused and the high, shrill call that indicated an encore
pierced through the smoke-laden air; and without question he turned and
followed Blake to one of the many tables standing in the shadow of the
galleries.

The table was packed tightly between other tables, and in the moment of
intoxication he had no glance to spare for his neighbors. Even Blake's
voice when it came to him sounded far away and impersonal.

"Sit down, boy! What will you drink?"

"What you drink, _mon ami_, I will drink."

He sat down and, with a new exuberance, threw himself back in his seat.
It was a moment of bravado that reckoned not at all with circumstance;
his gesture was imperiously reckless, the space about him was crowded to
suffocation; by a natural sequence of events his head came into sharp
contact with the waving plumes of a hat at the table behind him.