s are married.' But this brought
upon her an invariable retort: 'Well, why don't you get married then?
Franklin Winslow Kane asks nothing better.' This retort angered Althea,
but she was too fond of Franklin Winslow Kane to reply that perhaps
she, herself, did ask something better. So that it was as a convenience,
and not as a comfort, that she looked forward to Aunt Julia; and to the
girls she did not look forward at all. They were young, ebullient,
slangy; they belonged to a later generation than her own, strange to her
in that it seemed weighted with none of the responsibilities and
reverences that she had grown up among. It was a generation that had no
respect for and no anxiety concerning Europe; that played violent
outdoor games, and went without hats in summer.

The dining-room was full when she went down to dinner, her inward tremor
of shyness sustained by the consciousness of the perfect fit and cut of
her elaborate little dress. People sat at small tables, and the general
impression was one of circumspection and withdrawal. Most of the
occupants were of Althea's type--richly dressed, quiet-voiced Americans,
careful of their own dignity and quick at assessing other people's. A
French family loudly chattered and frankly stared in one corner; for the
rest, all seemed to be compatriots.

But after Althea had taken her seat at her own table near the pleasantly
open window, and had consulted the menu and ordered a half-bottle of
white wine, another young woman entered and went to the last vacant
table left in the room, the table next Althea's--so near, indeed, that
the waiter found some difficulty in squeezing himself between them when
he presented the _carte des vins_ to the newcomer.

She was not an American, Althea felt sure of this at once, and the mere
negation was so emphatic that it almost constituted, for the first
startled glance, a complete definition. But, glancing again and again,
while she ate her soup, Althea realised there were so many familiar
things the newcomer was not, that she seemed made up of differences. The
fact that she was English--she spoke to the waiter absent-mindedly in
that tongue--did not make her less different, for she was like no
English person that Althea had ever seen. She engaged at once the whole
of her attention, but at first Althea could not have said whether this
attention were admiring; her main impression was of oddity, of something
curiously arresting and noticeable.