The tables are elegantly arranged around the walls, deep sofas and divans are luxuriously set about them, while the centre is left unchallenged to the shimmering parquet floor. Of course all parquet floors shimmer, but none shimmers like this at the Ambassadors. One dines. One sups. Tommy Tittlebat’s Saxophone Six plays. The quality dance. The more Tommy Tittlebat’s Saxophone Six plays the more the quality dance, which is only reasonable. They jump up to dance at the exact moment when their food is put upon the table, and they cease dancing only when their food has become so cold that they have to hold lighted matches under the plates to warm them up. This causes much laughter. As evening melts exquisitely into night, the quality enter the Ambassadors in their hundreds, all calling each other and the waiters by their Christian names. Some bring well-dressed nobodies with them, some bring Jews, some bring titled what-nots from the provinces or from Labrador: so that by midnight the parquet floor is so crowded that you cannot see the parquet. Then it is great fun to dance. The game is played like this. As soon as a man and woman, sitting at their table, see a clear square foot of parquet floor they instantly leap on same, and, passionately embracing each other thereon, make movements of their eyebrows, hips, and feet in time to Tommy Tittlebat’s Saxophone Six. That is called dancing. They stay on their square foot of shimmering parquet floor until they get shoved off it by a beefier couple, whereupon the two gentlemen compliment each other in an elegant way--as is the way with persons of _ton_--or they call each other names (not Christian names)--as is also the way with persons of _ton_--until one or other of them is thrown out. That is called enjoying yourself, and you have to pay to do it. I paid, on the night I am telling you about. But not even Tommy Tittlebat’s Saxophone Six could drown the charm of Shelmerdene. Dear Shelmerdene.... At the table next to us sat a solitary gentleman. Obviously, we thought, he is waiting for some one, and obviously that some one has let him down. I am not much of a connoisseur as to men’s looks, but Shelmerdene knows about these things, and she said he was handsome. He was, even as he sat, noticeably tall; of strong and manly appearance; and, though swarthy in countenance, so essentially English-looking that it was with a disagreeable shock that, towards midnight, we noticed that his dark eyes were wet with tears. There is, as a rule, a scarcity of six-foot men weeping over supper at the Ambassadors. “Drunk,” I suggested harshly, but Shelmerdene is a kind woman and she said that he looked like a man haunted by a great calamity.