Luke contented himself with a touch to his hair, which had a way of standing upright, and a tug at his tie, which was forever straining toward independence.
"What’s this?" he asked as he lifted a glass case. He removed its lid and sniffed at the contents. "It looks like rouge," he added.
"But I thought this room was for men," said Luke.
Porcellis drew down the corners of his sensitive mouth.
A man-servant with those brief side-whiskers which, twenty years before, were used to proclaim the millionaire, stood splendidly against the crush about the doorway. He bent to each newcomer and secured a name, which, turning his head, but not moving his body, he then shouted, from an impassive face, into the ballroom.
"Good-evening, Mr. Porcellis. And the other gentleman, sir?"
"Mr. Huber," said Porcellis with careful distinctness.
The servant turned his head toward the crowd in the room behind him.
"Mr. Porcellis!" he cried, and then, as if it were an afterthought: "Mr. Urer!"
"It’s all right," Porcellis hurriedly reassured Luke. "Nobody pays the slightest attention to him, anyhow."
Nobody did. As they shouldered their way forward, the huge apartment that they now entered was like what Luke thought the rooms of state at Versailles must be, and the great hall in the Brussels Palace of Justice. All about the walls, and especially about the large entrance, was a press of men and women, standing still, or moving slowly from group to group through an invisible, but palpable, cloud formed by a mixture of the odor of withering flowers, Parisian scents, and human sweat. A band of music, concealed in a far-away balcony, blared rag-time, but distinct from its impudence, there rose from all these people the noise of shoe-leather dragged over parquette flooring, the composite of laughter in many keys and the perplexed buzz of small-talk. The moving figures of the women, over whom countless aigrettes quivered, had a kaleidoscopic effect, curiously unreal: an effect of flashing colors—crimson, ivory, blues, greens, and pinks—splashing against white breasts and backs, falling away from dazzling shoulders, the waves mounting in oily satin, feline velvet, or clinging peau de cygnes, and breaking in the foam of lace and the flying spray of diamonds. Here even the ordinary black-and-white of the men became black-and-gray or black-and-lavender, with gems for waistcoat buttons. On the dancing-floor many couples, hugging each other so tightly that their bodies touched from chest to center, swayed to the sensuous music of a one-step, the leaders’ high collars wilting, the fingers of their right hands spread wide along the women’s upper vertebras, their partners looking into their intent faces from narrowed eyes.