been so long an exile as to have forgotten his way
about entirely, and with what was new since his time Mademoiselle
Reneaux was thoroughly acquainted. And if he felt himself rather a
ghost revisiting glimpses of a forgotten moon, if all the odalisques
were new to his vision and all the sultans strange, if never an eye
that scanned his face turned back for a second look in uncertain
reminiscence, he had to console him the company of a young woman whom
everybody seemed to know and admire and like. In none of the resorts
they visited did she fail to greet or be hailed by a handful of
acquaintances. Yet they were generously let alone.

As to that, Lanyard could not complain. The truth was that, despite the
dark thread of sober purpose which ran through those tolerably purple
hours, he was being excellently entertained. Not by this sad business
of scampering from one place of dubious fame to another; not by any
reckless sense of rejuvenation to be distilled from the practice of
buying champagne at each stop--and leaving every bottle barely tasted;
not by those colourful, dissolving tableaux, always much the same in
composition if set against various backgrounds, of under-dressed women
sitting with concupiscent men and swallowing cold poisons in quantities
calculated to spur them into the frenzy of semi-orgiastic dances: by
none of these, but simply by the society of a woman of a type perhaps
not unique but novel in his experience and intriguing to his
understanding.

If there were anybody or thing a girl of her age--Athenais was about
twenty-five--shouldn't know, she knew him, her or it; if there were any
place she shouldn't go, she either went or had been there; if there
were anything she shouldn't do or say or think or countenance, those
things she--within limitations--did and said and thought and accepted
or passed over as matters of fact and no consequence. And though she
observed scrupulously certain self-imposed limitations she never made
this obvious, she simply avoided what she chose to consider bad taste
with a deftness and tact that would have seemed admirable in a woman of
the great world twice her age. And with it all she preserved a sort of
champagne effervescence of youthful spirits and an easy-going
cameraderie incomprehensible when one took into consideration the
disillusioning circumstances of her life, her vocation as a paid
government spy, trusted with secrets and worthy of her trust, dedicated
to days