ted that she might have been
through a great deal; but she was very cheerful and she laughed with
facility at things he said and that she herself said; and when she
laughed her eyes nearly closed and the tip of her tongue was caught,
with an effect of child-like gaiety, between her teeth. The darkness of
her skin made her lips, by contrast, of a pale rose, and her hair, where
it grew thickly around her brows and neck, of an almost infantile
fairness. Her broad, brown eyebrows lay far apart and her grey eyes were
direct, deliberate and limpid.

From where Gregory sat he had Madame von Marwitz in profile and he
observed that once or twice, when they laughed, she turned her head and
looked at them. Presently she leaned a little to question Mrs. Forrester
and then, rather vexed at a sequence, natural but unforeseen, he saw
that Mrs. Forrester got up to fetch him.

"Tante has sent for you!" Miss Woodruff exclaimed. "I am so glad."

It really vexed him a little that he should still be supposed to be
pining for an introduction; he would so much rather have stayed talking
to her. On the sofa she continued to stroke Hieronimus and to keep a
congratulatory gaze upon him while he was conducted to a seat beside the
great woman.

Madame von Marwitz was very lovely. She was the type of woman with whom,
as a boy, he would have fallen desperately in love, seeing her as poetry
personified. And she was the type of woman, all indolent and indifferent
as she was, who took it for granted that people would fall desperately
in love with her. Her long gaze, now, told him that. It seemed to give
him time, as it were, to take her in and to arrange with himself how
best to adjust himself to a changed life. It was not the glance of a
flirt; it held no petty consciousness; it was the gaze of an enchantress
aware of her own inevitable power. Gregory met the cold, sweet,
melancholy eyes. But as she gazed, as she slowly smiled, he was aware,
with a perverse pleasure, that his present seasoned self was completely
immune from her magic. He opposed commonplace to enchantment, and in him
Madame von Marwitz would find no victim.

"I have never seen you here before, I think," she said. She spoke with a
beautiful precision; that of the foreigner perfectly at ease in an alien
tongue, yet not loving it sufficiently to take liberties with it.

Gregory said, no, she had never seen him there before.

"Mrs. Forrester is, it seems, a mutual friend," said Mad