spicuous that there was a certain
ludicrousness in her appearance. It apparently displeased or surprised
Lady Montgomery, who, on Gregory's other hand, her head adorned with the
salmon-pink, ostrich feathers, raised a long tortoiseshell lorgnette and
fixed Madame von Marwitz through it for a mute, resentful moment. Madame
von Marwitz, erect and sublime as a goddess in a shrine, looked back. It
was a look lifted far above the region of Lady Montgomery's formal, and
after all only tentative, disapprobations; divine impertinence,
sovereign disdain informed it. Lady Montgomery dropped her lorgnette
with a little clatter and, adjusting her heavy diamond bracelets, turned
her sleek mid-Victorian head to her neighbour. Gregory did not know
whether to be amused or vexed.

It was now his part to carry on a conversation with the great woman: and
he found the task difficult. She was not silent, nor unresponsive. She
listened to his remarks with the almost disconcerting closeness of
attention that he had observed in her on their meeting of the other day,
seeming to seek in them some savour that still escaped her good-will.
She answered him alertly, swiftly, and often at random, as though by her
intelligence and competence to cover his ineptitude. Her smile was
brightly mechanical; her voice at once insistent and monotonous. She had
an air, which Gregory felt more and more to be almost insolent, of doing
her duty.

Bertram Fraser's turn came and he rose to it with his usual buoyancy. He
was interested in meeting Madame von Marwitz; but he was a young man who
had made his way in the world and perhaps exaggerated his achievement.
He expected people to be interested also in meeting him. He expected
from the great genius a reciprocal buoyancy. Madame von Marwitz bent her
brows upon him. Irony grew in her smile, a staccato crispness in her
utterance. Cool and competent as he was, Bertram presently looked
disconcerted; he did not easily forgive those who disconcerted him, and,
making no further effort to carry on the conversation, he sat silent,
smiling a little, and waited for his partner to turn to him again. Had
Gregory not taken up his talk, lamely and coldly, with Madame von
Marwitz, she would have been left in an awkward isolation.

She answered him now in a voice of lassitude and melancholy. Leaning
back in her chair, strange and almost stupefying object that she was,
her eyes moved slowly round the table with a wintry desolation