On low pedestals rising from the rim of the shallow oval basin of the fountain were three nude life-sized shapes delicately tinted, with gilt hair, carmined lips, darkened eyebrows, vague round eyes of pale blue. They had the flattened breasts and narrow hips of masculine adolescence with women’s faces and shoulders, arms and thighs. One held a finger hushingly on its lip; another was putting on a black vizard through which its pale eyes peeped slyly, the third was smiling over the rim of a golden drinking-cup. The Three were sharing a pleasant secret between them—or so it had seemed that night to Patrine. After complying with certain formalities, and paying a heavy fee for admission, Patrine with her friend had passed through to a wonderfully decorated supper-room with a big grill at the end, where white-capped cooks were busy with savoury things. Wind and strings filled the room with great waves of music. Liveried attendants were serving champagne in crystal jugs to men and women seated supping at the daintily-appointed tables. The hot eyes and lividly-pale or purple-flushed faces of many of the revellers, already told their tale of excess. The champagne at a guinea a jug, a speciality of the Upas, had seemed excellent to Patrine. She was out for enjoyment, and fizz made you feel top-hole. They had supped—was it lobster Américaine or grilled oysters that had preceded the other things?—when there came a change in the music. The unseen orchestra sighing and thrilling forth the amorous phrases of _Samson et Dalila_, leaped all at once into another familiar theme. To wit, the dance of the Jaguars in the Jungle, with its wail, clang, clash and growl as of strange, discordant, exotic instruments. "Drums covered with serpent-skin, gombos of elephant-tusk, human skull-rattles and all the paraphernalia of Voodoo," to quote Lady Beauvayse. Couples rose, and began passing out through a wide curtained exit at the farther end of the supper-room. The music grew madder. Patrine, laughing, took von Herrnung’s offered arm. "Now," he told her, "you are going to see something that is very _chic_! We shall dance in the Hall of the Hundred Pillars!" "How frightfully ripping!" said Patrine. Thus they joined the mob of people—a singularly quiet mob,—and passed through the heavy, curtained entrance. The much-talked-of Hall was merely a big circular ballroom, lighted by groups of electric lilies, set about with pillars of tinted glass, slanting from a dado of black marble, ending at a broad frieze of black beneath the ceiling-dome. Theatrical and tawdry, gaudy and glittering, the scheme of decoration reminded Patrine of the inside of a solitaire marble. The walls of fierce bright orange were striped in curving oblique and transverse lines of black-and-silver, the silver dome was decorated with similarly curving lines of orange-and-black.