asy companion. I
know exactly what I want. A mixed vermouth, if you like, yes. And now,
tell me your news?"

"There is news," he announced, "which the whole world will know of
before many hours are past. France has broken her pact with England."

"It is my opinion," she said deliberately, "that France has been very
patient with you."

"And mine," he acknowledged. "We have now to see what will become of a
fat and prosperous country with a semi-obsolete fleet and a comic opera
army."

"Must we talk of serious things?" she asked softly. "I am weary of the
clanking wheels of life."

He sighed.

"And yet for you," he said, "they are not grinding out the fate of your
country."

"Nevertheless, I too hear them all the time," she rejoined. "And I hate
them. They make one lose one's sense of proportion. After all, it is our
own individual and internal life which counts. I can understand Nero
fiddling while Rome burned, if he really had no power to call up fire
engines."

"Are you an individualist?" he asked.

"Not fundamentally," she replied, "but I am caught up in the throes of a
great reaction. I have been studying events, which it is quite true may
change the destinies of the world, so intently that I have almost
forgotten that, after all, the greatest thing in the world, my world, is
the happiness or ill-content of Naida Karetsky. It is really of more
importance to me to-day that my quail should be cooked as I like it than
that England has let go her last rope."

"You are not an Englishwoman," he reminded her.

"That is of minor importance. We are all so much immersed in great
affairs just now that we forget it is the small ones that count. I want
my luncheon to be perfect, I want you to seem as nice to me as I have
fancied you, and I want you to chase completely away the idea that you
are cultivating my acquaintance for interested motives."

"That I can assure you from the bottom of my heart is not the case," he
replied. "Whatever other interests I may feel in you," he added, after
a moment's hesitation, "my first and foremost is a personal one."

She looked at him with gratitude in her eyes for his understanding.

"A woman in my position," she complained, "is out of place. A man ought
to come over and study your deservings or your undeservings and pore
over the problem of the future of Europe. I am a woman, and I am not big
enough. I am too physical. I have forgotten how to enjoy myself, and I
love pleasu