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 to-night 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 red-faced 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.