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 a 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 eye-brows 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 red-faced man?  They seem to be with a party of your compatriots.”