e fencing-room,' and I took her into the studio.
They are there now and they are going to have their lunch together at
twelve o'clock."

"Why on earth didn't you tell me at first that the lady was Mrs. Blunt?"

"Didn't I? I thought I did," she said innocently. I felt a sudden
desire to get out of that house, to fly from the reinforced Blunt element
which was to me so oppressive.

"I want to get up and dress, Mademoiselle Therese," I said.

She gave a slight start and without looking at me again glided out of the
room, the many folds of her brown skirt remaining undisturbed as she
moved.

I looked at my watch; it was ten o'clock. Therese had been late with my
coffee. The delay was clearly caused by the unexpected arrival of Mr.
Blunt's mother, which might or might not have been expected by her son.
The existence of those Blunts made me feel uncomfortable in a peculiar
way as though they had been the denizens of another planet with a subtly
different point of view and something in the intelligence which was bound
to remain unknown to me. It caused in me a feeling of inferiority which
I intensely disliked. This did not arise from the actual fact that those
people originated in another continent. I had met Americans before. And
the Blunts were Americans. But so little! That was the trouble.
Captain Blunt might have been a Frenchman as far as languages, tones, and
manners went. But you could not have mistaken him for one. . . . Why?
You couldn't tell. It was something indefinite. It occurred to me while
I was towelling hard my hair, face, and the back of my neck, that I could
not meet J. K. Blunt on equal terms in any relation of life except
perhaps arms in hand, and in preference with pistols, which are less
intimate, acting at a distance--but arms of some sort. For physically
his life, which could be taken away from him, was exactly like mine, held
on the same terms and of the same vanishing quality.

I would have smiled at my absurdity if all, even the most intimate,
vestige of gaiety had not been crushed out of my heart by the intolerable
weight of my love for Rita. It crushed, it overshadowed, too, it was
immense. If there were any smiles in the world (which I didn't believe)
I could not have seen them. Love for Rita . . . if it was love, I asked
myself despairingly, while I brushed my hair before a glass. It did not
seem to have any sort of beginning as far as I could remember. A thing
the orig