moving on and off one, as if nothing in the world had the right to veil itself before their once sovereign beauty. Captain Blunt with smiling formality introduced me by name, adding with a certain relaxation of the formal tone the comment: "The Monsieur George! whose fame you tell me has reached even Paris." Mrs. Blunt's reception of me, glance, tones, even to the attitude of the admirably corseted figure, was most friendly, approaching the limit of half-familiarity. I had the feeling that I was beholding in her a captured ideal. No common experience! But I didn't care. It was very lucky perhaps for me that in a way I was like a very sick man who has yet preserved all his lucidity. I was not even wondering to myself at what on earth I was doing there. She breathed out: "Comme c'est romantique," at large to the dusty studio as it were; then pointing to a chair at her right hand, and bending slightly towards me she said:
"I have heard this name murmured by pretty lips in more than one royalist salon."
I didn't say anything to that ingratiating speech. I had only an odd thought that she could not have had such a figure, nothing like it, when she was seventeen and wore snowy muslin dresses on the family plantation in South Carolina, in pre-abolition days.
"You won't mind, I am sure, if an old woman whose heart is still young elects to call you by it," she declared.
"Certainly, Madame. It will be more romantic," I assented with a respectful bow.
She dropped a calm: "Yes--there is nothing like romance while one is young. So I will call you Monsieur George," she paused and then added, "I could never get old," in a matter-of-fact final tone as one would remark, "
