“I should say mixed.”  Then louder:  “As for instance . . . "

“As for instance Cleopatra,” answered Mills quietly.  He added after a pause:  “Who was not exactly pretty.”

“I should have thought rather a La Valliere,” Blunt dropped with an indifference of which one did not know what to make.  He may have begun to be bored with the subject.  But it may have been put on, for the whole personality was not clearly definable.  I, however, was not indifferent.  A woman is always an interesting subject and I was thoroughly awake to that interest.  Mills pondered for a while with a sort of dispassionate benevolence, at last: 

“Yes, Dona Rita as far as I know her is so varied in her simplicity that even that is possible,” he said.  “Yes.  A romantic resigned La Valliere . . . who had a big mouth.”

I felt moved to make myself heard.

“Did you know La Valliere, too?” I asked impertinently.

Mills only smiled at me.  “No.  I am not quite so old as that,” he said.  “But it’s not very difficult to know facts of that kind about a historical personage.  There were some ribald verses made at the time, and Louis XIV was congratulated on the possession—­I really don’t remember how it goes—­on the possession of: 

“. . . de ce bec amoureux
Qui d’une oreille a l’autre va,
Tra la la.

or something of the sort.  It needn’t be from ear to ear, but it’s a fact that a big mouth is often a sign of a certain generosity of mind and feeling.  Young man, beware of women with small mouths.  Beware of the others, too, of course; but a small mouth is a fatal sign.  Well, the royalist sympathizers can’t charge Dona Rita with any lack of generosity from what I hear.  Why should I judge her?  I have known her for, say, six hours altogether.  It was enough to feel the seduction of her native intelligence and of her splendid physique.  And all that was brought home to me so quickly,” he concluded, “because she had what some Frenchman has called the ’terrible gift of familiarity’.”

Blunt had been listening moodily.  He nodded assent.

“Yes!” Mills’ thoughts were still dwelling in the past.  “And when saying good-bye she could put in an instant an immense distance between herself and you.  A slight stiffening of that perfect figure, a change of the physiognomy:  it was like being dismissed by a person born in the purple.  Even if she did offer you her hand—­as she did to me—­it was as if across a broad river.  Trick of manner or a bit of truth peeping out?  Perhaps she’s really one of those inaccessible beings.  What do you think, Blunt?”

It was a direct question which for some reason (as if my range of sensitiveness had been increased already) displeased or rather disturbed me strangely.  Blunt seemed not to have heard it.  But after a while he turned to me.

“That thick man,” he said in a tone of perfect urbanity, “is as fine as a needle.  All these statements about the seduction and then this final doubt expressed after only two visits which could not have included more than six hours altogether and this some three years ago!  But it is Henry Allegre that you should ask this question, Mr. Mills.”