Raymond de Chelles, straight, slim and gravely smiling, came toward him with frequent pauses of salutation at the crowded tables; saying, as he seated himself and turned his pleasant eyes on the scene: “Il n’y a pas à dire, my dear Bowen, it’s charming and sympathetic and original—we owe America a debt of gratitude for inventing it!”
Bowen felt a last touch of satisfaction: they were the very words to complete his thought.
“My dear fellow, it’s really you and your kind who are responsible. It’s the direct creation of feudalism, like all the great social upheavals!”
Raymond de Chelles stroked his handsome brown moustache. “I should have said, on the contrary, that one enjoyed it for the contrast. It’s such a refreshing change from our institutions—which are, nevertheless, the necessary foundations of society. But just as one may have an infinite admiration for one’s wife, and yet occasionally—” he waved a light hand toward the spectacle. “This, in the social order, is the diversion, the permitted diversion, that your original race has devised: a kind of superior Bohemia, where one may be respectable without being bored.”
Bowen laughed. “You’ve put it in a nutshell: the ideal of the American woman is to be respectable without being bored; and from that point of view this world they’ve invented has more originality than I gave it credit for.”
Chelles thoughtfully unfolded his napkin. “My impression’s a superficial one, of course—for as to what goes on underneath—!” He looked across the room. “If I married I shouldn’t care to have my wife come here too often.”
Bowen laughed again. “She’d be as safe as in a bank! Nothing ever goes on! Nothing that ever happens here is real.”
“Ah, quant à cela—” the Frenchman murmured, inserting a fork into his melon. Bowen looked at him with enjoyment—he was such a precious foot-note to the page! The two men, accidentally thrown together some years previously during a trip up the Nile, always met again with pleasure when Bowen returned to France. Raymond de Chelles, who came of a family of moderate fortune, lived for the greater part of the year on his father’s estates in Burgundy; but he came up every spring to the entresol of the old Marquis’s hotel for a two months’ study of human nature, applying to the pursuit the discriminating taste and transient ardour that give the finest bloom to pleasure. Bowen liked him as a companion and admired him as a charming specimen of the Frenchman of his class, embodying in his lean, fatigued and finished person that happy mean of simplicity and intelligence of which no other race has found the secret. If Raymond de Chelles had been English he would have been a mere fox-hunting animal, with appetites but without tastes; but in his lighter Gallic clay the wholesome territorial savour, the inherited passion for sport and agriculture, were blent with an openness to finer sensations, a sense of the come-and-go of ideas, under which one felt the tight hold of two or three inherited notions, religious, political, and domestic, in total contradiction to his surface attitude. That the inherited notions would in the end prevail, everything in his appearance declared from the distinguished slant of his nose to the narrow forehead under his thinning hair; he was the kind of man who would inevitably “revert” when he married. But meanwhile the surface he presented to the play of life was broad enough to take in the fantastic spectacle of the Nouveau Luxe; and to see its gestures reflected in a Latin consciousness was an endless entertainment to Bowen.
The tone of his guest’s last words made him take them up. “But is the lady you allude to more than a hypothesis? Surely you’re not thinking of getting married?”
Chelles raised his eyebrows ironically. “When hasn’t one to think of it, in my situation? One hears of nothing else at home—one knows that, like death, it has to come.” His glance, which was still mustering the room, came to a sudden pause and kindled.
“Who’s the lady over there—fair-haired, in white—the one who’s just come in with the redfaced man? They seem to be with a party of your compatriots.”
Bowen followed his glance to a neighbouring table, where, at the moment, Undine Marvell was seating herself at Peter Van Degen’s side, in the company of the Harvey Shallums, the beautiful Mrs. Beringer and a dozen other New York figures.
She was so placed that as she took her seat she recognized Bowen and sent him a smile across the tables. She was more simply dressed than usual, and the pink lights, warming her cheeks and striking gleams from her hair, gave her face a dewy freshness that was new to Bowen. He had always thought her beauty too obvious, too bathed in the bright publicity of the American air; but tonight she seemed to have been brushed by the wing of poetry, and its shadow lingered in her eyes.
Chelles’ gaze made it evident that he had received the same impression.
“One is sometimes inclined to deny your compatriots actual beauty—to charge them with producing the effect without having the features; but in this case—you say you know the lady?”
“Yes: she’s the wife of an old friend.”
“The wife? She’s married? There, again, it’s so puzzling! Your young girls look so experienced, and your married women sometimes so—unmarried.”
“Well, they often are—in these days of divorce!”
The other’s interest quickened. “Your friend’s divorced?”
“Oh, no; heaven forbid! Mrs. Marvell hasn’t been long married; and it was a love-match of the good old kind.”
“Ah—and the husband? Which is he?”
“He’s not here—he’s in New York.”
“Feverishly adding to a fortune already monstrous?”
“No; not precisely monstrous. The Marvells are not well off,” said Bowen, amused by his friend’s interrogations.
“And he allows an exquisite being like that to come to Paris without him—and in company with the redfaced gentleman who seems so alive to his advantages?”
“We don’t ‘allow’ our women this or that; I don’t think we set much store by the compulsory virtues.”
His companion received this with amusement. “If: you’re as detached as that, why does the obsolete institution of marriage survive with you?”
“Oh, it still has its uses. One couldn’t be divorced without it.”
Chelles laughed again; but his straying eye still followed the same direction, and Bowen noticed that the fact was not unremarked by the object of his contemplation. Undine’s party was one of the liveliest in the room: the American laugh rose above the din of the orchestra as the American toilets dominated the less daring effects at the other tables. Undine, on entering, had seemed to be in the same mood as her companions; but Bowen saw that, as she became conscious of his friend’s observation, she isolated herself in a kind of soft abstraction; and he admired the adaptability which enabled her to draw from such surroundings the contrasting graces of reserve.
They had greeted each other with all the outer signs of cordiality, but Bowen fancied she would not care to have him speak to her. She was evidently dining with Van Degen, and Van Degen’s proximity was the last fact she would wish to have transmitted to the critics in Washington Square. Bowen was therefore surprised when, as he rose to leave the restaurant, he heard himself hailed by Peter.
“Hallo—hold on! When did you come over? Mrs. Marvell’s dying for the last news about the old homestead.”
Undine’s
