2
The principal interest of Mr. Satterthwaite’s life was people. He was on the whole more interested in women than men. For a manly¹ man, Mr. Satterthwaite knew far too much about women. There was a womanish strain in his character which lent him insight into the feminine mind. Women all his life had confided² in him, but they had never taken him seriously. Sometimes he felt a little bitter about this. He was, he felt, always in the stalls watching the play, never on the stage taking part in the drama. But in truth the r?le of onlooker³ suited him very well.
This evening, sitting in the large room giving on to the terrace, cleverly decorated by a modern form to resemble a ship’s cabin de luxe, he was principally interested in the exact shade of hair dye attained⁴ by Cynthia Dacres. It was an entirely⁵ new tone - straight from Paris, he suspected - a curious and rather pleasing effect of greenish bronze. What Mrs. Dacres really looked like it was impossible to tell. She was a tall woman with a figure perfectly⁶ disciplined to the demands of the moment. Her neck and arms were her usual shade of summer tan for the country - whether naturally or artificially produced it was impossible to tell. The greenish bronze hair was set in a clever and novel style that only London’s best hairdresser could achieve. Her plucked eyebrows⁷, darkened lashes⁸, exquisitely⁹ made-up face, and mouth lip-sticked to a curve that its naturally straight line did not possess, seemed all adjuncts to the perfection of her evening gown of a deed and unusual blue, cut very simply it seemed (though this was ludicrously far from the case) and of an unusual material - dull, but with hidden lights in it.

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