In the shout of applause that greeted her, she skipped deftly from the table, flung herself upon Noll’s knees, held up his face, kissed him, and with “Thou handsome Englishman!” she laughed, put him gaily from her, proudly went her way, and was lost in the tumultuous throng. Noll laughed embarrassedly. She had set the fashion; on to the tables leaped a score of models, in fancy dress, and danced among the glasses; the great revel proceeding with riot and feasting and boisterous merriment. In the midst of the whirlwind moved Gaston Latour, disguised in his usual affectation of lugubrious and melancholy seriousness. He went arrayed as Midnight Alarms--for trousers he wore a white shirt, his legs solemnly thrust through the sleeves, the cuffs fastened about his ankles with enormous brooches for gaudy sleeve-links, enormous naked indiarubber feet strapped on for boots. This symbolism of hurried midnight dressing was further insisted upon by the lady’s stays that bound the shirt’s tails about his waist, his shoulders bare, save for the great hunting-horn over his chest, and a fireman’s bucket strapped to the top of his head. The pretty little model who was with him, dressed solely in a pair of shoes and Gaston’s corduroy trousers, the braces holding them up, strapped over her white shoulders, replenished this bucket on his head during the evening with heel-taps from the wine-glasses, so that whilst talking confidentially to anyone, Gaston gradually lowered his head until the liquor splashed down upon their faces and trickled down the front of them--a result greeted by Gaston with a loud triumphant blare on the horn. Gérôme’s students had drawn their tables into a semicircle; and before the centre table, where the massier sat, were two young Frenchmen in the armour of Roman lictors; they were holding up Ponsonby Wattles Ffolliott under the armpits, whilst he, dressed as Narcissus, with a bath towel strapped round his loins, and daffodils in his hair, was drunkenly attempting to make a speech. He showed signs of going to sleep, spite of the occasional shaking up by the lictors; so, amidst loud laughter, they all held out their hands, thumbs down, and Gaston Latour advancing from his seat with a soup-tureen, poured a libation of soup over his hair, and as it trickled down his stupid pallid features, clapped the tureen on his head; the lictors carried him away and laid him upon the floor amongst a heap of black bottles, where he settled to uneasy rest, and mumbled into sleep....