urely on account of Cleo. Beside the people
interested in her there were several friends and relations of Prince
Selm, also his lawyer.

"I have taken rooms at the Hotel Noailles," said Madame de Brie, "and I
have brought you some clothes. Oh, my poor child, what you must have
suffered. But why did the people on board not lend you some better
things?"

"Oh, my clothes are all right," said Cleo, "people wanted to lend me
things, but I am quite comfortable in these."

She was looking about in search of Raft who was nowhere to be seen.

Then she was seized by the rest, by the Comtesse de Mirandole, by Madame
de Florey, and several others who had stopped at Marseilles--on their
way to Monte Carlo--to meet the _Carcassonne_ and greet the girl who had
alone survived the wreck of the _Gaston de Paris_, some of these people
knew her only slightly, but once a person becomes famous or notorious it
is astonishing how slight acquaintanceship blossoms into full
friendship.

Several photographers from the illustrated papers were amongst the crowd
and a Pathe operator was on the quay.

Cleo was already recovering that sixth sense, which one might call the
social sense, and, as she talked almost to half a dozen people at once,
answering questions and receiving felicitations, this sixth sense told
her quite plainly that she was being criticised by her felicitators,
that in their eyes she was a guy. That the old velour hat she had
borrowed, the hair that shewed beneath it, her face, which had still
upon it a reflection of Kerguelen, her old skirt and coat--all these
things, singly and taken together, were exciting in the minds of these
Parisians a pity which was not unrelated to humour. She did not mind,
she was looking for Raft.

It seemed to her that all these people, excellent in their way, had a
tinge of unreality about them. On the voyage she had sometimes vaguely
dreaded that Raft might be pushed away from her, despite herself, by the
contrast between him and her own order. It had come to her that the
difference between the beach of Kerguelen and the Avenue Malakoff might
take her like a giant of mind and divorce her from her allegiance to
him. That the good companion, the true friend, the person she loved
might alter completely under the touch of social alchemy.

Raft was impossible. She knew that. More impossible even than a sea
elephant from that far beach where life was real and Paris a dream.
Impossible in Paris wher