rkable, or betrayed any of those unspoken perceptions
which give significance to the most commonplace utterances. She talked
of the lateness of her train, of an impending crisis in international
politics, of the difficulty of buying English tea in Paris and of the
enormities of which French servants were capable; and her views on these
subjects were enunciated with a uniformity of emphasis implying complete
unconsciousness of any difference in their interest and importance. She
always applied to the French race the distant epithet of "those people",
but she betrayed an intimate acquaintance with many of its members,
and an encyclopaedic knowledge of the domestic habits, financial
difficulties and private complications of various persons of social
importance. Yet, as she evidently felt no incongruity in her
attitude, so she revealed no desire to parade her familiarity with the
fashionable, or indeed any sense of it as a fact to be paraded. It was
evident that the titled ladies whom she spoke of as Mimi or Simone or
Odette were as much "those people" to her as the bonne who tampered with
her tea and steamed the stamps off her letters ("when, by a miracle,
I don't put them in the box myself.") Her whole attitude was of a vast
grim tolerance of things-as-they-came, as though she had been some
wonderful automatic machine which recorded facts but had not yet been
perfected to the point of sorting or labelling them.

All this, as Darrow was aware, still fell short of accounting for the
influence she obviously exerted on the persons in contact with her.
It brought a slight relief to his state of tension to go on wondering,
while he watched and listened, just where the mystery lurked.
Perhaps, after all, it was in the fact of her blank insensibility,
an insensibility so devoid of egotism that it had no hardness and no
grimaces, but rather the freshness of a simpler mental state. After
living, as he had, as they all had, for the last few days, in an
atmosphere perpetually tremulous with echoes and implications, it was
restful and fortifying merely to walk into the big blank area of Miss
Painter's mind, so vacuous for all its accumulated items, so echoless
for all its vacuity.

His hope of a word with Anna before dinner was dispelled by her rising
to take Miss Painter up to Madame de Chantelle; and he wandered away
to his own room, leaving Owen and Miss Viner engaged in working out a
picture-puzzle for Effie.

Madame de Chantel