I accepted the invitation with a worldly grin and a perfectly just intonation, because I really didn’t care what I did.  I only wondered vaguely why that fellow required all the air in the room for himself.  There did not seem enough left to go down my throat.  I didn’t say that I would come with pleasure or that I would be delighted, but I said that I would come.  He seemed to forget his tongue in his head, put his hands in his pockets and moved about vaguely.  “I am a little nervous this morning,” he said in French, stopping short and looking me straight in the eyes.  His own were deep sunk, dark, fatal.  I asked with some malice, that no one could have detected in my intonation, “How’s that sleeplessness?”

He muttered through his teeth, “Mal.  Je ne dors plus.”  He moved off to stand at the window with his back to the room.  I sat down on a sofa that was there and put my feet up, and silence took possession of the room.

“Isn’t this street ridiculous?” said Blunt suddenly, and crossing the room rapidly waved his hand to me, “A bientot donc,” and was gone.  He had seared himself into my mind.  I did not understand him nor his mother then; which made them more impressive; but I have discovered since that those two figures required no mystery to make them memorable.  Of course it isn’t every day that one meets a mother that lives by her wits and a son that lives by his sword, but there was a perfect finish about their ambiguous personalities which is not to be met twice in a life-time.  I shall never forget that grey dress with ample skirts and long corsage yet with infinite style, the ancient as if ghostly beauty of outlines, the black lace, the silver hair, the harmonious, restrained movements of those white, soft hands like the hands of a queen—­or an abbess; and in the general fresh effect of her person the brilliant eyes like two stars with the calm reposeful way they had of 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.”