feeling that I was beholding in her a
captured ideal. No common experience! But I didn't care. It was very
lucky perhaps for me that in a way I was like a very sick man who has yet
preserved all his lucidity. I was not even wondering to myself at what
on earth I was doing there. She breathed out: "_Comme c'est
romantique_," at large to the dusty studio as it were; then pointing to a
chair at her right hand, and bending slightly towards me she said:

"I have heard this name murmured by pretty lips in more than one royalist
salon."

I didn't say anything to that ingratiating speech. I had only an odd
thought that she could not have had such a figure, nothing like it, when
she was seventeen and wore snowy muslin dresses on the family plantation
in South Carolina, in pre-abolition days.

"You won't mind, I am sure, if an old woman whose heart is still young
elects to call you by it," she declared.

"Certainly, Madame. It will be more romantic," I assented with a
respectful bow.

She dropped a calm: "Yes--there is nothing like romance while one is
young. So I will call you Monsieur George," she paused and then added,
"I could never get old," in a matter-of-fact final tone as one would
remark, "I could never learn to swim," and I had the presence of mind to
say in a tone to match, "_C'est evident_, Madame." It was evident. She
couldn't get old; and across the table her thirty-year-old son who
couldn't get sleep sat listening with courteous detachment and the
narrowest possible line of white underlining his silky black moustache.

"Your services are immensely appreciated," she said with an amusing touch
of importance as of a great official lady. "Immensely appreciated by
people in a position to understand the great significance of the Carlist
movement in the South. There it has to combat anarchism, too. I who
have lived through the Commune . . ."

Therese came in with a dish, and for the rest of the lunch the
conversation so well begun drifted amongst the most appalling inanities
of the religious-royalist-legitimist order. The ears of all the Bourbons
in the world must have been burning. Mrs. Blunt seemed to have come into
personal contact with a good many of them and the marvellous insipidity
of her recollections was astonishing to my inexperience. I looked at her
from time to time thinking: She has seen slavery, she has seen the
Commune, she knows two continents, she has seen a civil war, the glory of