"You wore grey silk pyjamas."
"And you wore nothing at all."
Marcia hesitated and then sat down, nodding in acknowledgement to Baroness Zawisza, who was sitting opposite in a peacock-blue gown onto which pink pearls had been sewn in trompe-l'oeil circles on each breast. Somehow it was five times as erotic to glimpse the baroness's priceless simulations than it was to see the real authentic articles. Sabran, who wore white pumps and no socks, stood sulkily behind the baroness's chair.
Marcia murmured to Mark, reaching her hand up to touch his cheek, "I told you that night that we were two free-flying creatures, lovers by accident rather than design. Two random snowflakes whirling through the night, sometimes touching, sometimes far away, blown on the wind."
"Thats right. That's what you said."
"And you believed me?"
"Why not?"
"If you don't know why not, then you don't know women very well. Good God, Mark, you don't even understand how gorgeous you are. Ronald Colman? He's nothing. You're a beautiful man; so beautiful you're more like some exotic species of animal, rather than a man. Whenever I hold you, it's like holding a lion."
"Marcia," Mark interrupted hastily, conscious that Baroness Zawisza and two or three of the other guests were listening to all of this with undisguised fascination. "Marcia, this isn't the time or the place. Please. Let's discuss it later."
Marcia was unabashed by the amused stares of her table companions. "Perhaps there won't be any later. After all, you seem to have other things in mind."
Mark took Marcia's hand and pressed it to his lips. "You are quite stunning," he told her softly, "in every sense of the word."
Baroness Zawisza laughed out loud, and applauded. Mark raised his eyes from Marcia's hand, and for one split-second caught Catriona looking at him from her seat next to Sir Peregrine. He had no way of knowing that Catriona had Baroness Zawisza's words on her mind: Men are interested only in three things: automobiles, fighting, and their own semen."
Catriona had been placed opposite George Welterman, and next (on her left) to Douglas Fairbanks. While Douglas Fairbanks dominated the conversation with a long and funny story about Lee de Forest and the problems he had encountered with Phonofilm—the first sound-on-film motion picture, which had been released last year—Catriona had time to study George Welterman more closely. He was a big, padded-looking man, with a large, horselike head, and yet he wasn't entirely unattractive. His face was deeply cleft with lines, and his hair was a dull alloy grey; but there was a strangely youthful look in his pale blue eyes, as if a twenty-year-old man had been made up with cosmetics and rubber and false eyebrows to play the part of a middle-aged tyrant. He wore only one ring, and that was not on his wedding-finger. It was a heavy signet of twenty-four carat gold with an embossed crest on it.
Douglas Fairbanks, having finished his story, turned to Catriona and raised his glass of champagne. "That's enough about me," he told her. "I think it's time we heard from our beautiful hostess, don't you? We may not have got very far yet, but up until now this voyage has been the most fun I've had in years, and that includes making The Three Musketeers in "twenty-one. I'd like to propose an impromptu toast to Miss Catriona Keys, for being such a brilliant jewel in such a brilliant setting."
till drink to that," said George Welterman, and raised his glass, too. He had a slow, exact, and cultured-sounding voice. His blue eyes didn't leave Catriona's face once. "This shipping line has an unfair advantage in my opinion. The world's most beautiful passenger liner, and the world's most beautiful heiress."
Catriona glanced at Edgar, and saw that he was watching her keenly but with obvious approval. When George Welterman reached across the white linen tablecloth and touched Catriona's hand, Edgar smiled to himself and took a sip of champagne as buoyantly as if he were congratulating himself.
"You're too flattering," Catriona told George Welterman. She wished very much that Edgar would stop staring, and smiling.
George Welterman said, "I never flatter. I'm not in the flattering business. I'm a man of complete exactitude."
"You hear that?" laughed Douglas Fairbanks. "When a man like that tells you you're beautiful, you can lay money on it, you're beautiful. I wish he'd tell me that I'm beautiful."
"How do you like Ireland, Mr. Welterman?" asked Catriona, in that lofty tone of voice that Nigel always used to call her "Queen-Victoria-asking-the-Zulu-King-how-he-liked-whist" voice. But George Welterman recognised her attempt to distance him for what it was, and in the same precise way as before said, "You can call me George, if you care to." His eyes were still fixed on her, still unblinking. He gave Catriona the unsettling feeling that he was able to see right 1 her clothes, perhaps even deeper than that, into her mind. It was like having the leg of her step-ins pulled aside by a cold and inquiring hand, like feeling icy fingers caressing her with detached and calculating intimacy. She looked away to one side, but him she looked back again, George Welterman was still staring at her.
"Very well, then, George," she acknowledged, with a polite smile that she allowed to die almost instantly. She couldn't think why he made her feel so very young, and so very clumsy. She was used to being able to captivate almost all of the men and boys she met, simply by being pretty and sharp and bright. But it was going to take more than prettiness, and more than brightness, to cope with George Welterman. It might even take more than her inherited fortune. He a about him an utter hardness which even his precise voice and his friendly table talk couldn't disguise. Anybody who wanted to beat George Welterman at his own game, business or sexual, would have to be equally uncompromising: diamond against diamond.
"You went to Ireland on business? Or just for the Guinness?" asked Douglas Fairbanks.
"Personally, I can't think of a single defensible inducement for visiting Ireland at all," put in Sir Peregrine, and then abruptly remembered, like a man jolted by that odd falling sensation just before going to sleep, that he was sitting only one place away from Mr. O'Hara, from the Irish bank. Fortunately, Mr. O'Hara seemed to be engrossed in a conversation about bedding plants with Mrs John D. Rappermeyer IV, who cultivated rhododendra, and he hadn't heard. Or diplomatically pretended he hadn't.
"I don't have the time to travel for any other reason except business," George Welterman said. "I haven't taken a vacation in twenty years and I'm not sure that I'd take one if it was offered to me. That doesn't mean that I'm blind to my surroundings, though. Whenever I can, I try to take a quick tour of the surrounding countryside. This time, I was given the use of an automobile for a few days, and I was able to visit the west coast."
"Very romantic place, the west coast of Ireland," Douglas Fairbanks remarked, brushing up his moustache with his fingertips. "But the precipitation is all hell."
"He means the rain," put in Mary Pickford, who had been half listening to what they were saying.
"I found it... rather frightening, in a way," said George Welterman.
"I couldn't imagine anything frightening you," Catriona said, archly.
"Oh, I don't mean frightened in the sense that I felt personally threatened. The Irish are very friendly people, perhaps more so to Americans than they are to the English. No, what frightened me was the lack of will to progress. It was the acceptance of things as they are, and as they always have been. As long as there are just sufficient potatoes to keep the family alive, and just enough peat to cook them on, and as long as there's a little tea-bread on Sundays for when the priest comes to call, and a little whiskey to keep the cold out, they seem to be satisfied. There's no sense of commercial aggression whatsoever. There's no capitalism, not in the way that we understand it."