"Nothing very new.... But—the music made by those buck niggers! ’_Bizzarramente_’ isn’t the word for it. One expects to see gombos covered with serpent-skin, trumpets of elephant-tusk, skull-rattles, and all the paraphernalia of Obeah in the orchestra, instead of those huge, superb brass wind-instruments, cymbals as big as table-tops and ten-foot silver trumpets, like poor de Souza’s.... Raised in the States, but wasn’t he a Brazilian by birth?" It was the voice of Lady Beauvayse, and von Herrnung’s answered from behind Patrine: "It may be so. But the _Blechinstrumente_ and the _Blasinstrumente_—for the biggest of those they have to go to Germany. Nowhere else can they be made as there.... Bravo! ... _Bis—bis!_" He applauded.... Everybody was applauding. The gyroscopic whirl of dancers had become stationary. All now were eager spectators. And the three couples from São Paulo had reached the culminating point of a uniquely curious and exotic figure. Savage and violent, sinuous and creeping; suggestive of the nocturnal gambols of enamoured jaguars, in the deep primeval forests of Brazil. "Horrid! One expects them to lash tails and roar.... I’ve got what Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch called ’cold clams walking up my backbone.’" Lady Beauvayse shuddered and made a pretty grimace. "All the same I think I’ll go down and look at them a little closer. Ah-h! ... Good grapes! Why, he simply picked her up by the scruff of the neck with his teeth and shook her.... I’ve just _got_ to see that done over again!" She was gone, with a whisk of the emerald bird of paradise and a waft of _parfum très persistant_. Captain Courtley vanished in her wake. Patrine made no motion to follow them. The tense excitement, the pungent exhalations rising from the crowded ball-room were affecting her brain. She felt giddy, and the steady pressure of the crowd behind her was thrusting her to the very verge of the promenade. She yielded automatically, unconscious of danger near. You are to see her there, poised on the verge of the rose-carpeted precipice, her hand gripping the velvet-covered railing, her wide nostrils distended, her broad bosom heaving as she inhaled the sultry, vitiated atmosphere, heavy with a myriad perfumes, tainted by a thousand breaths. Her stare, lifeless as the enamelled, glittering regard of some Princess-mummy of Old Egypt, was fixed upon the artists, of whom two couples had retired, as though in despair of competition with the chief favourites, leaving La Rivadavia and her comrade Herculano in possession of the floor.