The happy girl went on talking. Suddenly Gilbert realised that she was telling him something, innocent enough in her mouth, but something that a woman should tell to a woman and not to a man.
The decent gentleman in him became wide awake, the sense of comeliness and propriety. He wasn't in the least shocked--indeed there was nothing whatever to be shocked about--but he wanted to save her, in time, from an after-realisation of a frankness that might give her moments of confusion.
He did it, as he did everything when he was really sober, really himself, with a supreme grace and delicacy. "Cupid dear," he said with his open and boyish smile, "you really oughtn't to tell me that, you know. I mean--well, think!"
She looked at him with puzzled eyes for a moment and then she took his meaning. A slight flush came into her cheeks.
"Oh, I see," she replied thoughtfully, and then, with a radiant smile and the provocative, challenging look--"Gilbert dear, you seem just like a girl to me. I quite forgot you were a man. So it doesn't matter, does it?"
Who was to attempt to preserve _les convenances_ with such a delightful child as this?
"Here is the dessert," he said gaily, as waiters brought ices, nectarines, and pear-shaped Paris bon-bons filled with Benedictine and Chartreuse.
A single bottle of champagne had served them for the meal. Gilbert lit a cigarette and said two words to a waiter. In a minute he was brought a carafe of whiskey and a big bottle of Perrier in a silver stand. It was a dreadful thing to do, from a gastronomic or from a health point of view. Whiskey, now! He saw the look of wonder on the waiter's face, a pained wonder, as who should say, "Well, I shouldn't have thought _this_ gentleman would have done such a thing."
But Lothian didn't care. It was only upon the morning after a debauch, when with moles' eyes he watched every one with suspicion and with fear, that he cared twopence what people thought about anything he did.
He was roused to a high pitch of excitement by his beautiful companion. Recklessness, an entire abandon to the Dance of the Hours was mounting up within him. But where there's a conscience, there's a Rubicon. The little brook stretched before him still, but now he meant to leap over it into the forbidden, enchanted country beyond. He ordered "jumping powder."