Page:Pleased to Meet You (1927).pdf/73

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familiar to all, and the President himself, seizing a stout matron, capered with gusto.

Colonel Cointreau circulated helpfully in the gay rout. The humorous cantata of his mouth-organ was heard wherever the mirth was thickest. Evidently his severe life as an international negotiator had not dimmed a simple human relish for comely females; he was seen footing an intricate morris with Lorli, Nyla's pretty tirewoman; he lined up the chambermaids to be photographed, amid much laughter and broad jest, himself slipping modestly away whenever a lens was pointed in his direction. When in the unusual exertion Frau Innsbruck burst some private reef-points and ruptured a garter, the Colonel was first to seize the tensile fragment and hail it as a tender trophy. It was so long since Frau Innsbruck's garter had had any publicity or been the object of competition or saltatorial strain that the housekeeper went moist and ruddy with pleased confusion.

"It's easy to see he's a real aristocrat," she confided to Romsteck as they withdrew from