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, “I could never learn to swim,” and I had the presence of mind to say in a tone to match, “C’est evident, Madame.”  It was evident.  She couldn’t get old; and across the table her thirty-year-old son who couldn’t get sleep sat listening with courteous detachment and the narrowest possible line of white underlining his silky black moustache.

“Your services are immensely appreciated,” she said with an amusing touch of importance as of a great official lady.  “Immensely appreciated by people in a position to understand the great significance of the Carlist movement in the South.  There it has to combat anarchism, too.  I who have lived through the Commune . . .”

Therese came in with a dish, and for the rest of the lunch the conversation so well begun drifted amongst the most appalling inanities of the religious-royalist-legitimist order.  The ears of all the Bourbons in the world must have been burning.  Mrs. Blunt seemed to have come into personal contact with a good many of them and the marvellous insipidity of her recollections was astonishing to my inexperience.  I looked at her from time to time thinking:  She has seen slavery, she has seen the Commune, she knows two continents, she has seen a civil war, the glory of the Second Empire, the horrors of two sieges; she has been in contact with marked personalities, with great events, she has lived on her wealth, on her personality, and there she is with her plumage unruffled, as glossy as ever, unable to get old:—­a sort of Phoenix free from the slightest signs of ashes and dust, all complacent amongst those inanities as if there had been nothing else in the world.  In my youthful haste I asked myself what sort of airy soul she had.

At last Therese put a dish of fruit on the table, a small collection of oranges, raisins, and nuts.  No doubt she had bought that lot very cheap and it did not look at all inviting.  Captain Blunt jumped up.  “My mother can’t stand tobacco smoke.  Will you keep her company, mon cher, while I take a turn with a cigar in that ridiculous garden.  The brougham from the hotel will be here very soon.”

He left us in the white flash of an apologetic grin.  Almost directly he reappeared, visible from head to foot through the glass side of the studio, pacing up and down the central path of that “ridiculous” garden:  for its elegance and its air of good breeding the most remarkable figure that I have ever seen before or since.  He had changed his coat.  Madame Blunt mere lowered the long-handled glasses through which she had been contemplating him with an appraising, absorbed expression which had nothing maternal in it.  But what she said to me was: