for a comely woman, was a sight to see) I was not surprised to hear our hostess tell him that he had been the life and soul of the party.
A few days later he was in bed again and his doctor forbade him to leave his room. Elliott was exasperated.
'It's too bad this should happen just now. It's a particularly brilliant season.'
He reeled off a long list of persons of importance who were spending the summer on the Riviera.
I went to see him every three or four days. Sometimes he was in bed, but sometimes he lay on a chaise longue in agorgeous dressing-gown. He seemed to have an inexhaustible supply of them, for I do not remember that I ever saw him in the same one twice. On one of these occasions, it was the beginning of August by now, I found Elliott unusually quiet. Joseph had told me when he let me into the house that he seemed a little better so I was surprised that he was so listless. I tried to amuse him with such gossip of the coast as I had picked up, but he was plainly uninterested. There was a slight frown between his eyes, and a sullenness in his expression that was unusual with him.
'Are you going to Edna Novemali's party?' he asked me suddenly.
'No, of course not.'
'Has she asked you?'
'She's asked everybody on the Riviera.'
The Princess Novemali was an American of immense wealth who had married a Roman prince, but not an ordinary prince such as go for two a penny in Italy, but the head of a great family and the descendant of a condottiere who had carved out a principality for himself in the sixteenth century. She was a woman of sixty, a widow, and since the Fascist regime demanded too large a slice of her American income to suit her, she had left Italy and built herself, on a fine estate behind Cannes, a Florentine villa. She had brought marble from Italy with which to line the walls of her great reception rooms and imported painters to paint the ceilings. Her pictures, her bronzes, were uncommonly fine and even Elliott, though he didn't like Italian furniture, was obliged to admit that hers was magnificent. The gardens were lovely and the swimming-pool must have cost a small fortune. She entertained largely and you never sat down less than twenty at table. She had arranged to give a fancy-dress party on the night of the August full moon, and although it was still three weeks ahead nothing else was being talked of on the Riviera. There were to be fireworks and she was bringing down a coloured orchestra from Paris. The exiled royalties were telling one another with envious admiration that it would cost her more than they had to live on for a year.
'It's princely,' they said.
'It's crazy,' they said.
'It's in bad taste,' they said.
'What are you going to wear?' Elliott asked me.
'But I told you, Elliott, I'm not going. You don't think I'm going to dress myself up in fancy dress at my time of life.'
'She hasn't asked me,' he said hoarsely.
He looked at me with haggard eyes.
'Oh, she will,' I said coolly. 'I dare say all the invitations haven't gone out yet.'
'She's not going to ask me.' His voice broke. 'It's a deliberate insult.'
'Oh, Elliott, I can't believe that. I'm sure it's an oversight.'
'I'm not a man that people overlook.'
'Anyhow, you wouldn't have been well enough to go.'
'Of course I should. The best party of the season! If I were on m?deathbed I'd get up for it. I've got the costume of my ancestor, the Count de Lauria, to wear.'
I did not quite know what to say and so remained silent.
'Paul Barton was in to see me just before you came,' Elliott said suddenly.
I cannot expect the reader to remember who this was, since I had to look back myself to see what name I had given him. Paul Barton was the young American whom Elliott had introduced into London society and who had aroused his hatred by dropping him when he no longer had any use for him. He had been somewhat in the public eye of late, first because he had adopted British nationality and then because he had married the daughter of a newspaper magnate who had been raised to the peerage. With this influence behind him and with his own adroitness it was