well a statement I read some years ago in your 'Mes Etudes des Femmes'
to the effect that you had never met a really intellectual woman. May I
ask, without being impertinent, whether that assertion still represents
your experience?"

"I meant, madam," said the novelist conservatively, "intellectual in
a sense very special, as we say of men in whom the purely intellectual
functions seem almost independent."

"And you still think a woman so constituted a mythical personage?"
persisted Flavia, nodding her head encouragingly.

"_Une Meduse_, madam, who, if she were discovered, would transmute us
all into stone," said the novelist, bowing gravely. "If she existed at
all," he added deliberately, "it was my business to find her, and
she has cost me many a vain pilgrimage. Like Rudel of Tripoli, I have
crossed seas and penetrated deserts to seek her out. I have, indeed,
encountered women of learning whose industry I have been compelled
to respect; many who have possessed beauty and charm and perplexing
cleverness; a few with remarkable information and a sort of fatal
facility."

"And Mrs. Browning, George Eliot, and your own Mme. Dudevant?" queried
Flavia with that fervid enthusiasm with which she could, on occasion,
utter things simply incomprehensible for their banality--at her feats of
this sort Miss Broadwood was wont to sit breathless with admiration.

"Madam, while the intellect was undeniably present in the performances
of those women, it was only the stick of the rocket. Although this
woman has eluded me I have studied her conditions and perturbances as
astronomers conjecture the orbits of planets they have never seen.
if she exists, she is probably neither an artist nor a woman with a
mission, but an obscure personage, with imperative intellectual needs,
who absorbs rather than produces."

Flavia, still nodding nervously, fixed a strained glance of
interrogation upon M. Roux. "Then you think she would be a woman whose
first necessity would be to know, whose instincts would be satisfied
only with the best, who could draw from others; appreciative, merely?"

The novelist lifted his dull eyes to his interlocutress with an
untranslatable smile and a slight inclination of his shoulders. "Exactly
so; you are really remarkable, madam," he added, in a tone of cold
astonishment.

After dinner the guests took their coffee in the music room, where
Schemetzkin sat down at the piano to drum ragtime, and give his
celebra