and languorous.

"You see that!" Nick pointed to a blaze of electricity to the left on the
opposite side of the road. "That's where we shall take you to dine, after
you've spruced yourselves up. You needn't bother about fancy dress.
Monsieur Dauphin always has stacks of kimonos--for his models, you know."

While the travellers spruced themselves up in different bedrooms, Tommy
chattered through one pair of double doors ajar, and Nick through the
other, and Musa strummed with many mistakes on an antique Pleyel piano. And
as Audrey listened to the talk of these acquaintances, Tommy and Nick, who
in half an hour had put on the hue of her lifelong friends, and as she
heard the piano, and felt the vibration of cars far beneath, she decided
that she was still growing happier and happier, and that life and the world
were marvellous.

A little later they passed into the café-restaurant through a throng of
seated sippers who were spread around its portals like a defence. The
interior, low, and stretching backwards, apparently endless, into the
bowels of the building, was swimming in the brightest light. At a raised
semicircular counter in the centre two women were enthroned, plump, sedate,
darkly dressed, and of middle age. To these priestesses came a constant
succession of waiters, in the classic garb of waiters, bearing trays which
they offered to the gaze of the women, and afterwards throwing down coins
that rang on the marble of the counter. One of the women wrote swiftly in a
great tome. Both of them, while performing their duties, glanced
continually into every part of the establishment, watching especially each
departure and each arrival.

At scores of tables were the most heterogeneous collection of people that