ought better of the committee now. He
perceived the wonderful goodness of it and of its work. It really was
running those real hospitals; it had a real interest in them. He meant
to do his very best in the accounts department. After all, he had been
a lawyer and knew the routine of an office and the minutest phenomena
of a ledger. He was eager to begin.

"How findest thou me?"

She stood for inspection.

She was ready, except the gloves. The angle of her hat, the
provocation of her veil--these things would have quickened the pulse
of a Patagonian. Perfume pervaded the room.

He gave the classic response that nothing could render trite:

"_Tu es exquise_."

She raised her veil just above her mouth....

In the drawing-room she hesitated, and then settled down on the
piano-stool like a bird alighting and played a few bars from the
_Rosenkavalier_ waltz. He was thunderstruck, for she had got not only
the air but some of the accompaniment right.

"Go on! Go on!" he urged her, marvelling.

She turned, smiling, and shook her head.

"That is all that I can recall to myself."

The obvious sincerity of his appreciation delighted her.

"She is really musical!" he thought, and was convinced that while
looking for a bit of coloured glass he had picked up an emerald.
Marthe produced his overcoat, and when he was ready for the street
Christine gazed at him and said:

"For the true _chic_, there are only Englishmen!"

In the taxi she proved to him by delicate effronteries the genuineness
of her confessed "fancy" for him. And she poured out slang. He began
to be afraid, for this excursion was an experiment such as he had
never tried before in London; in Paris, of course, the code was
otherwise. But as soon as the commissionaire of the restaurant at
Victoria approached the door of the taxi her manner changed. She
walked up the long interior with the demureness of a stockbroker's
young wife out for the evening from Putney Hill. He thought, relieved,
"She is the embodiment of common sense." At the end of the vista of
white tables the restaurant opened out to the left. In a far corner
they were comfortably secure from observation. They sat down. A waiter
beamed his flatteries upon them. G.J. was serenely aware of his own
skilled faculty for ordering a dinner. He looked over the menu card at
Christine. Nobody could possibly tell that she was a professed enemy
of society. "These French women are astounding!" he thought. He