I’m no authority on the dance; the performer, not the performance, is what I pay to see. But it seemed to me that she was damned good. Her striking beauty brought the pit up with a gasp: she was in a black bodice, cut so low that her breasts seemed to be in continual danger of popping out, and her tiny pink skirt showed off her legs to tremendous advantage. The slim white neck and shoulders, the coal-black hair, the gleaming eyes, the scarlet lips curled almost in contempt—the whole effect was startling and exotic. You know these throbbing, Spanish rhythms; well, she swayed and shook and stamped her way through them in splendid passion, and the audience sat spellbound. She was at once inviting and challenging; I doubt if there was any gesture or movement in the whole dance that a magistrate could have taken exception to, and yet the whole effect of it was sensual. It seemed to say “Bed me—if you dare”, and every man in the place was taking her clothes off as he watched. What the women thought I can’t imagine, but I guess they admired her almost as much as they disliked her.16

When she finished abruptly, with a final smash of her foot and clash of cymbals from the orchestra, the theatre went wild. They cheered and stamped, and she stood for a moment still as a statue, staring proudly down at them, and then swept straight off the stage. The applause was deafening, but she didn’t come back, and there were sighs and a few groans when the curtain went up again on the next act of the opera, and those damned Macaronis began yelping again.

Through all this Ranelagh had sat forward in his chair, staring at her, but never said a word. He didn’t pay the least attention to the opera, but when Lola came on for her second dance, which was even more tempestuous than the first, he made a great show of examining her through his glasses. Everyone else was doing the same, of course, in the hope that her bodice would burst, which it seemed likely to do at any moment, but when the applause broke out, wilder than ever, he kept his glasses glued to his eyes, and when she had gone he was seen to be frowning in a very puzzled way. This was all leading up to the denouement, of course, and when she bounced on, snapping her fan, for the third time, I heard him mutter to his nearest neighbour:

“You chaps keep your eyes on me. I’ll give the word, mind, and then we’ll see some fun.”