As if in answer to Millie Deans's words, Max Elliot moved away with her, and took her through the throng to Mrs. Shiffney, who turned round with her movement of the shoulders as they came up. Charmian, watching, saw Mrs. Shiffney's gay and careless smile, the piercing light in her eyes as she looked swiftly at the singer, who faced her with a tragic and determined expression. The portrait painter stood by, with his rather protruding eyes fixed on Miss Deans. As Charmian glanced round at the crowd and spoke to one person and another she was seized again by her horror of being one of the unknown lives. She saw many celebrities. She yearned to be numbered among them. If she could even be as Mrs. Shiffney, an arbiter of taste, a setter of fashions in admiration; if she could see people look at her, as Millie Deans looked at Mrs. Shiffney, with the hard determination to win her over to their side in the battle of art, she thought she could be happy. But to be nobody, "that pretty little Charmian," "that graceful Charmian Mansfield, but she's not half as clever as her mother"! To-night she felt as if she could not bear it. Mrs. Shiffney had turned away from the singer, and now her eyes rested on Charmian. She nodded and smiled and made a beckoning motion with her left hand. But at this moment a singer and composer, half Spanish, half nobody knew what, who called himself Ferdinand Rades, sat down before the piano with a lighted cigarette in his mouth and struck a few soft chords, looking about him with a sort of sad and languid insolence and frowning till his thick eyebrows came down to make a penthouse roof above his jet black eyes. "Hush--hush, please!" said Max Elliot, loudly. "'Sh--'sh--'sh! Monsieur Rades is going to sing." He bent to Rades. "What is it? Monsieur Rades will sing _Le Moulin_, and _Le Retour de Madame Blague_." There was a ripple of applause, and Mrs. Shiffney hastily made her way to a chair just in front of the piano, sat down on it, and gazed at Rades, who turned and stared at her. Then, taking the cigarette from his mouth, he sang _Le Moulin_ at her, leaning back, swaying and moving his thick eyebrows. It was a sad song, full of autumnal atmosphere, a delicate and sensual caress of sorrow. The handsome composer and the lusty musical critic listened to it, watched the singer with a sort of bland contempt. But when he threw away his cigarette and sang _Le Retour de Madame Blague_, an outrageous trifle, full of biting esprit and insolent wit, with a refrain like the hum of Paris by night, and a long _bouche fermee_ effect at the end, even they joined in the laughter and the applause, though with a certain reluctance, as if, in doing so, they half feared to descend into a gutter where slippery and slimy things made their abode.