That's tough, thought Grover, and the song grew grimmer. Step on the gas, Mamie, he muttered to himself, a little savagely, for he was oppressed by his middle-west surroundings and was assuring himself that he hadn't come to Paris to be tortured by an immigrant from Idaho Falls who should have stayed there and got rid of her voice in the great open spaces.
Floss had departed to greet another influx, Léon was in the toils of the Marchesa, and Grover was left to roam at will, feeling that he was the only guest who hadn't been snapped up by somebody.
When the dancing began he fared somewhat better. Floss, crossing his path, sent him a quick beaming nod, and he began, against his Bostonian prejudices, to like her. "I ought to been born in the days of Rubens," he heard her remark to the Marchesa's Spaniard, who replied with affected ardor, his eyes on Floss's pearls, that he would love to paint her as she was. "Go on, man!" mocked the princess, "you haven't got enough paint."
For his sins Grover had to dance with Miss Mangum, who drooped and swayed and leaned upon him and kept breaking into bad French. Her gestures, like her garments, were borrowed, and not one of them fitted her. The worst of it was, no one came to his rescue, and he had Mamie on his hands for an hour. When he brought her some champagne and sandwiches he found her powdering her long nose with a powder that looked like pollen. That operation achieved, she
