THE Salone is one thing not beautiful in Raona, though the gay little modern building is inconspicuous and may be pleasantly approached through a cypress-bordered garden. What should not be in Raona is the interior of the Salone; the manufactured throbbings of a "night club" are misplaced upon the majestic cliff that looked down upon the passing of Odysseus.
Arturo Liana hated the Salone, yet he was there, this afternoon, at a table near the door, and alone. At the opposite end of the room an orchestra of red-coated men produced adroitly suggestive tango music, to which the silent dancers moved with what seemed to Arturo a snaky accuracy. Most of the women were pale under heavily applied artificial complexions that the red lamps failed to make plausible; the men were pale, too, and there was no merriment in this sleek dancing, but, on the contrary, a trancelike gravity—a gravity as of pallid masks covering intricate and sly emotions. Slyness seemed the very air of the place; it
