Baroudi accepted all these attentions with a magnificent indifference that had in it nothing of assumption. They sat down, he ordered coffee and liqueurs, and they listened to the music, which was genuinely good, and had the peculiar fervent and yet melancholy flavour which music receives from the bows of Hungarian fiddlers. Nigel was smoking. He seemed profoundly attentive, did not attempt any conversation, and kept his eyes on the ground. Mrs. Armine seemed listening attentively, too, but she had not been sitting for five minutes before she had seen and summed up every group in her neighborhood; had defined the nationalities, criticized the gowns and faces of the women, and made up her mind as to the characters of the men who accompanied them, and as to the family or amorous ties uniting them to each other and the men.
And she had done more than this: she had measured the amount of interest, of curiosity, of admiration, of envy, of condemnation which she herself excited with the almost unerring scales of the clever woman who has lived for years both in the great and the half worlds.
Quite near them, not level with their table, but a little behind it on the right, within easy range of her eyes, Lord and Lady Hayman were sitting, with another English couple, a Sir John and Lady Murchison, smart, gambling, racing, pleasure-loving people, who seemed to be everywhere at the same time, and never to miss any function of importance where their "set" put in an appearance. Lady Murchison was a pretty and vindictive blonde--the sort of woman who looks as if she would bite you if you did not let her have her way. She was smiling cruelly now, and murmuring to Lady Hayman, a naturally large, but powerfully compressed personage, with a too-sanguine complexion insufficiently corrected by powder, and a too-autocratic temperament insufficiently corrected by Lord Hayman.
All these people--Mrs. Armine knew it "in her bones"--had just been reading the Morning Post. Here in Egypt they stood for "London." She saw London's verdict, "Serve her right," in their cool smiles, their moments of direct attention to herself--an attention hard, insolent, frigid as steel--in the curious glances of pity combined with a sort of animal, almost school-boy, amusement, which the two men sent towards Nigel.
She looked from "London" to "Egypt," represented by Baroudi. In marrying Nigel she had longed to set her heel upon the London which had despised her; she had hoped some day to set the heel of Lady Harwich upon more than one woman whom she had known before she was cast out. Secretly she had reckoned upon that, as upon something that was certain, something for which she had only to wait. Lord Harwich was worn out, and he was a wildly reckless man, always having accidents, always breaking his bones. She would only have to wait.