The waltz ended, and another began; and Mr. Edmondson, who seemed to have shaken off his seriousness and to have lapsed into youth again, came up to Amory and asked her whether he might have the pleasure. Amory, resolved to go through it now that she was here, placed her hand on his arm. "Might as well have one of these while there's any left," he said genially, snatching a paper fan from the mantelpiece as they passed; "I wonder what those blighters are up to!" He indicated the group that conspired near the door.... "You ain't interested in football, I s'pose? I'm going to the Final at the Palace on Saturday--special leave, what oh!--Donkins'll take my place--and it won't half be a squeeze, I give you _my_ word! Funny place to go for a squeeze, eh, Miss Amory?"
Mr. Edmondson was now quite the Mr. Edmondson of the green waistcoat, not to be got at by girls if he knew it.
And still the inscrutable Miss Addams, with her eye drifting a little more frequently towards the door, gave no sign.
"Here, I say, come orf it!" Mr. Edmondson grinned as he and Amory passed M. Criqui and Mrs. Deschamps for the fourth time. They were talking French. "No taking advantage, Criqui!... I don't call that playing the game," he continued to Amory. "But you talk French, of course?"
"Hanged if I can make out half what them blighters say," Mr. Edmondson continued cheerfully. "In English, I mean. One of 'em came up this morning--8.45--right in the thick. '_To-tnm-co-croad!_' he says, just like that; and if I don't give him a brief for Tott-n-m C't Road and the right change before you can say knife I've got Aspinall down on me like a cartload o'bricks. It ain't no tea-party, my job ain't, not in the thick, you take _my_ word for it! Chap tried to ring a bad two-bob on me this morning; broke in two in the clip--you've seen the clips we use, haven't you? What, you haven't? Just you notice some time!--Broke in two--like that--and him barging there with twenty people behind shouting 'Hurry up' and prodding him with their sticks and brollies. Oh, it's a pinch, I _don't_ think!"
But still Miss Addams's surprise didn't come. After that waltz Mrs. Deschamps flatly refused to play again until she had had a dance, and so Miss Crebbin, the typist, played, to calls of "New ribbon, Miss C----! Mind the visible writing!" Then Mrs. Deschamps sat, first by the door, where she told M. Criqui that all Frenchmen had such dreadful reputations, and next at the open window at the back, where she asked him what "In the Spring a Young Man's Fancy" was in French, and then disappeared altogether. Aunt Geraldine, laughing, moved everywhere, with Mr. Massey following her with his hands clasped behind his back, and if she had to show her half-hoop of diamonds once she had to do so a dozen times. Then Mrs. Deschamps came back, crying over her shoulder, "If you tell, M. Criqui, I'll never speak to you again!" but M. Criqui did tell, of how Mrs. Deschamps, venturing into the greenhouse downstairs that was used as a smoking-room, had been detained almost by force until she had smoked half a cigarette.