lf and Isabel no one was present but her
father and mother, he watched her guide the conversation into the
channels of an urbane small-talk, and it occurred to him that in just
such a manner would a marquise under the shadow of the guillotine toy
with the affairs of a day that would know no morrow. Her delicate
features, the aristocratic shortness of her upper lip, and her wealth of
fair hair suggested the marquise again, and it must have been obvious,
even if it were not notorious, that in her veins flowed the best blood
in Chicago. The dining-room was a fitting frame to her fragile beauty,
for Isabel had caused the house, a replica of a palace on the Grand
Canal at Venice, to be furnished by an English expert in the style of
Louis XV; and the graceful decoration linked with the name of that
amorous monarch enhanced her loveliness and at the same time acquired
from it a more profound significance. For Isabel's mind was richly
stored, and her conversation, however light, was never flippant. She
spoke now of the _Musicale_ to which she and her mother had been in the
afternoon, of the lectures which an English poet was giving at the
Auditorium, of the political situation, and of the Old Master which her
father had recently bought for fifty thousand dollars in New York. It
comforted Bateman to hear her. He felt that he was once more in the
civilised world, at the centre of culture and distinction; and certain
voices, troubling and yet against his will refusing to still their
clamour, were at last silent in his heart.

"Gee, but it's good to be back in Chicago," he said.

At last dinner was over, and when they went out of the dining-room
Isabel said to her mother:

"I'm going to take Bateman along to my den. We have various things to
talk about."

"Very well, my dear," said Mrs Longstaffe. "You'll find your father and
me in the Madame du Barry room when you're through."

Isabel led the young man upstairs and showed him into the room of which
he had so many charming memories. Though he knew it so well he could not
repress the exclamation of delight which it always wrung from him. She
looked round with a smile.

"I think it's a success," she said. "The main thing is that it's right.
There's not even an ashtray that isn't of the period."

"I suppose that's what makes it so wonderful. Like all you do it's so
superlatively right."

They sat down in front of a log fire and Isabel looked at him with calm
grave eyes.

"