After the Race Page #2

								

homage to the snorting motor. The party was to dine together that
evening in Ségouin’s hotel and, meanwhile, Jimmy and his friend, who
was staying with him, were to go home to dress. The car steered out
slowly for Grafton Street while the two young men pushed their way
through the knot of gazers. They walked northward with a curious
feeling of disappointment in the exercise, while the city hung its pale
globes of light above them in a haze of summer evening.

In Jimmy’s house this dinner had been pronounced an occasion. A certain
pride mingled with his parents’ trepidation, a certain eagerness, also,
to play fast and loose for the names of great foreign cities have at
least this virtue. Jimmy, too, looked very well when he was dressed
and, as he stood in the hall giving a last equation to the bows of his
dress tie, his father may have felt even commercially satisfied at
having secured for his son qualities often unpurchaseable. His father,
therefore, was unusually friendly with Villona and his manner expressed
a real respect for foreign accomplishments; but this subtlety of his
host was probably lost upon the Hungarian, who was beginning to have a
sharp desire for his dinner.

The dinner was excellent, exquisite. Ségouin, Jimmy decided, had a very
refined taste. The party was increased by a young Englishman named
Routh whom Jimmy had seen with Ségouin at Cambridge. The young men
supped in a snug room lit by electric candle-lamps. They talked volubly
and with little reserve. Jimmy, whose imagination was kindling,
conceived the lively youth of the Frenchmen twined elegantly upon the
firm framework of the Englishman’s manner. A graceful image of his, he
thought, and a just one. He admired the dexterity with which their host
directed the conversation. The five young men had various tastes and
their tongues had been loosened. Villona, with immense respect, began
to discover to the mildly surprised Englishman the beauties of the
English madrigal, deploring the loss of old instruments. Rivière, not
wholly ingenuously, undertook to explain to Jimmy the triumph of the
French mechanicians. The resonant voice of the Hungarian was about to
prevail in ridicule of the spurious lutes of the romantic painters when
Ségouin shepherded his party into politics. Here was congenial ground
for all. Jimmy, under generous influences, felt the buried zeal of his
father wake to life within him: he aroused the torpid Routh at last.
The room grew doubly hot and Ségouin’s task grew harder each moment:
there was even danger of personal spite. The alert host at an
opportunity lifted his glass to Humanity and, when the toast had been
drunk, he threw open a window significantly.

That night the city wore the mask of a capital. The five young men
strolled along Stephen’s Green in a faint cloud of aromatic smoke. They
talked loudly and gaily and their cloaks dangled from their shoulders.
The people made way for them. At the corner of Grafton Street a short
fat man was putting two handsome ladies on a car in charge of another
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