and back home alone up a side street. Amidst the shouting of women and the interwoven dark thick growlings of conversations she heard Mr. Mendizabal’s ironic snorting laugh not far behind her. Glancing round from the free space of darkness she had reached she saw him emerge shouldering from a group of women, short and square and upright and gleaming brilliantly with the remains of his laughter. A furious wrath flickered over her. He came forward with his eyes ahead unseeing, nearer, near, safe at her side, her little foreign Mr. Mendizabal, mild and homely.
Here is Ruscino’s mademoiselle, all ons, we will go to Ruscino all ons! Ruscino, in electric lights round the top of the little square portico, like the name of a play round the portico of a theatre, the sentry figure of the commissionaire, the passing glimpse of palm ferns standing in semidarkness just inside the portico, the darkness beyond, suddenly became a place, separate and distinct from the vague confusion of it in her mind with the Oxford Music Hall; offering itself, open before her, claiming to range itself in her experience; open, with her inside and the mysteries of the portico behind … continental London ahead of her, streaming towards her in mingled odours of continental food and wine, rich intoxicating odours in an air heavy and parched with the flavour of cigars, throbbing with the solid, filmy thrilling swing of music. It was a café! Mr. Mendizabal was evidently a habitué. She could be, by right of her happiness abroad. She was here as a foreigner, all her English friends calling her back from a spectacle she could not witness without contamination. Only Gerald knew the spectacle of Ruscino’s. “Lord, Ruscino’s; Lord .” … In a vast open space of light, set in a circle of balconied gloom, innumerable little tables held groups of people wreathed in a brilliancy of screened light, veiled in mist, clear in sharp spaces of light, clouded by drifting spirals of smoke. They sat down at right angles to each other at a little table under the central height. The confines of the room were invisible. All about them were worldly wicked happy people.