Max remembered Blake's words--"These are true citizens of the true Bohemia." But the woman Lize had turned at her cry, and laid a plump, jewelled hand over her slim, nervous fingers.
"Jacqueline! My child, what is wrong ?" "He is here! And Lucien is here! And I am afraid!" The words were vague, but the elder woman asked for no explanation.
"Does Lucien know ?" The girl shook her head.
"And this beast--where is he ?" The girl, silent from emotional excitement, nodded toward the opposite bar, and a light flickered up into Lize's eyes as she scanned the crowd divided from them by the space of waxed floor, from which the Spanish dancers had just retreated.
Max raised his glass and drank some of his champagne.

His first dread of the place was gripping him again--exciting him, confusing him.

All about him, like the scent-laden atmosphere itself, moved the crowd--the girls of Montmartre and their cavaliers.

Everywhere was that sense of conscious enjoyment--that grasping of the mere moment that the Parisian has reduced to a science.

It enveloped him like a veil--the artless artificiality of Paris! Everywhere fans emblazoned with the words Bal Tabarin fluttered like butterflies, everywhere cigar smoke mingled with the essences from the women's clothes, but beneath it all lurked a something unanalyzed, dimly understood, that chained his imagination.