She lifted the glass to her lips and sipped at it. It was good stuff, rather strong. The burn on her palate seemed to brace her; she looked round the room. It was a peculiar scene; for the Vesuvius is a luxurious place, and a provincial might well be excused for thinking it was the Carlton or the Savoy; indeed there was something more outwardly opulent about it. It suggested a place where men not only spent what they had but spent more. But for a few men in frock-coats and tweeds it would have been almost undistinguishable from the recognised resorts of fashion. Victoria took stock of her surroundings; of the shining plate and glass, the heavy red carpet, the red and gold curtains, drawn but fluttering at the open windows. The guests, however, interested her more. At half the tables sat a woman and a man, at others a woman alone before a little glass. What struck her above all was the beauty of the women, the wealth they carried on their bodies. Hardly one of them seemed over thirty; most of them had golden or vivid red hair, though a few tables off Victoria could see a tall woman of colour with black hair stiffened by wax and pierced with massive ivory combs. They mostly wore low-necked dresses, many of them white or faintly tinted with blue or pink. She could see a dark Italian-looking girl in scarlet from whose ears long coral earrings drooped to her slim cream-coloured shoulders. There was an enormously stout woman with puffy pink cheeks, strapped slightly into a white silk costume, looking like a rose at the height of its bloom. There were others too! short dark women with tight hair; minxish French faces and little shrewd dark eyes; florid Dutch and Belgian women with massive busts and splendid shoulders, dazzlingly white; English girls too, most of them slim with long arms and rosy elbows and faintly outlined collar bones. Many of these had the aristocratic nonchalance of 'art' photographs. Opposite Victoria, under the other chandelier, a splendid creature, white as a lily, with flashing green eyes, copper coloured hair, had thrown herself back in her armchair and was laughing at a man's joke. Her head was bent back, and as she laughed her splendid bust rose and fell and her throat filled out. An elderly man with a close clipped grey moustache, immaculate in his well-cut dress clothes, leaned towards her with a smile on his brown face.