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.
With volubility and dispatch the owner of the hat expressed her opinion of his awkwardness; one or two people near them laughed, and, flushing a desperate red, he turned, raised his hat, and offered an apology.
The possessor of the feathers was a woman of thirty who looked ten years older than her age; her face was unhealthily pale even beneath its mask of powder, and her eyes were curiously lifeless, but her clothes were costly and her figure fine, if a trifle robust.

At sound of the boy's voice she turned.

Her movement was slow and deliberate; her gaze, in which a dull resentment smouldered, passed over his confused, flushed face, and rested upon Blake's; then a light, if light it might be called, glimmered in her eyes, and her immobile face relaxed into a smile.
"'_Allo, mon cher_! But I thought you had dropped out of life!" The boy, with a startled movement, turned his eyes on Blake; but Blake was smiling at the woman with the same pleasant smile--half humorous, half satirical--that he had bestowed dispassionately upon the young Englishman in the train the night before, and upon the little _cafe_ proprietress of the rue Fabert--the smile that all his life had been a passport to the world's byways.
"What! you, Lize!" he was saying easily, and with only the faintest shadow of surprise.