so was the ball in Dauphin's studio an intensification of the
café-restaurant. It had more colour, more noise, more music, more heat,
more varied kinds of people, and, of course, far more riotous movement than
the café-restaurant. The only quality in which the café-restaurant stood
first was that of sustenance. Monsieur Dauphin had not attempted to rival
the café-restaurant in the matter of food and drink. And that there was no
general hope of his doing so could be deduced from the fact that many of
the more experienced guests arrived with bottles, fruit, sausages, and
sandwiches of their own.

When Audrey and her friends entered the precincts of the vast new white
building in the Boulevard Raspail, upon whose topmost floor Monsieur
Dauphin painted the portraits of the women of the French, British, and
American plutocracies and aristocracies, a lift full of gay-coloured
figures was just shooting upwards past the wrought-iron balustrades of the
gigantic staircase. Tommy and Nick stopped to speak to a columbine who
hovered between the pavement and the threshold of the house.

"I don't know whether it's the grenadine or the lobster, or whether it's
Paris," said Miss Ingate confidentially in the interval; "but I can
scarcely tell whether I'm standing on my head or my heels."

Before the Americans rejoined them, the lift had returned and ascended with
another covey of fancy costumes, including a man with a nose a foot long
and a girl with bright green hair, dressed as an acrobat. On its next
journey the lift held Tommy and Nick's party, and it held no more.

When the party emerged from it, they were greeted with a cheer, hoarse and
half human, by a band of light amateur mountebanks of both sexes who were
huddled in a doorway. Within a quarter of an hour Audrey and Miss Ingate,