preferences for any of them. They rested on the vacuously Bonaparte
prince, on the moribund German Jesuit to whom he was listening, on the
darkly supple young Spanish priest, on the rosy-gilled English
Passionist, on Radet, the writer of that article in the _Revue Rouge_,
who was talking to a compatriot in one of the tall windows. She seemed
to accept the saturnine-looking men, the political women, who all spoke
a language not their own, with an accent and a fluency, and a dangerous
far-away smile and a display of questionable teeth all their own. She
seemed to class the political with the pious, the obvious adventurer
with the seeming fanatic. It was amazing to me to see her there,
standing with her county family self-possession in the midst of so much
that was questionable. She offered me no explanation; I had to find one
for myself.

We stood and talked in the centre of the room. It did not seem a place
in which one _could_ sit.

"Why have you never been to see me?" she asked languidly. "I might never
have known of your existence if it had not been for your sister." My
sister was standing at my side, you must remember. I don't suppose that
I started, but I made my aunt no answer.

"Indeed," she went on, "I should never have known that you had a sister.
Your father was so _very_ peculiar. From the day he married, my husband
never heard a word from him."

"They were so very different," I said, listlessly.

"Ah, yes," she answered, "brothers so often are." She sighed, apropos
of nothing. She continued to utter disjointed sentences from which I
gathered a skeleton history of my _soi distant_ sister's introduction of
herself and of her pretensions. She had, it seemed, casually introduced
herself at some garden-party or function of the sort, had represented
herself as a sister of my own to whom a maternal uncle had left a
fabulous fortune. She herself had suggested her being sheltered under my
aunt's roof as a singularly welcome "paying guest." She herself, too,
had suggested the visit to Paris and had hired the house from a
degenerate Duc de Luynes who preferred the delights of an _appartement_
in the less lugubrious Avenue Marceau.

"We have tastes so much in common," my aunt explained, as she moved away
to welcome a new arrival. I was left alone with the woman who called
herself my sister.

We stood a little apart. Each little group of talkers in the vast room
seemed to stand just without earshot of the next. I