"You see," she asked the others, "what I mean? He says things like that to me. He told me once that in a former incarnation I had walked beside the Nile and had loved a king."
"Will you tell mine?" Eve asked suddenly.
"I am mademoiselle. You go first, Marie-Louise."
But Marie-Louise insisted on yielding to her. "We will come back for you."
Coming back, they found Eve in an irritable temper. "He told me--nothing."
"I told you what you did not want to hear. But I told you the truth."
"I don't believe in such things." Eve was lofty. Her cold eyes challenged the Oriental. "I don't believe you know anything about it."
"If Mademoiselle will write it down----" He was fat and puffy, but he had a sort of large dignity which ignored her rudeness. "If Mademoiselle will write it down, she will not say--next year--'I do not believe.'"
She shivered. "I wish I hadn't come. Dicky boy, let's go and play. Pip and Marie-Louise can stay if they like it. I don't."
When Marie-Louise had had her imagination once more fed on poets, kings, and previous incarnations, she and Pip went forth to seek the others.
"I wonder what he told Eve?" Pip speculated.
Marie-Louise spoke with shrewdness. "He probably told her that she would marry you--only he wouldn't put it that way. He would say that in reaching for a star she would stumble on a diamond."
She nodded, grinning. "And you are the diamond. It is what she wants--diamonds."
"She wants more than that"--tenderness crept into his voice--"she wants love--and I can give it."
"She wants Dr. Brooks. 'Most any woman would," said Marie-Louise cruelly. "We all know he is different. You know it, and I know it, and Eve knows it. He is bigger in some ways, and better!"
They found Eve and Richard in a pavilion dancing in strange company, to raucous music. Later the four of them rode on a merry-go-round, with Marie-Louise on a dolphin and Eve on a swan, with the two men mounted on twin dragons. They ate chowder and broiled lobster in a restaurant high in a fantastic tower. They swept up painted Alpine slopes in reckless cars, they drifted through dark tunnels in gorgeous gondolas. Eve took her pleasures with a sort of feverish enthusiasm, Marie-Louise with the air of a skeptic trying out a new thing.