industrious creatures was really formidable.  But it could not detract from the scenic triumph.  The scenic triumph dazzlingly justified itself, and proved beyond any cavilling that earth was a grand, intoxicating place, and Longchamps under the sun an unequalled paradise of the senses....  Ah!  These women were finished—­finished to the least detail of coiffure, sunshade-handle, hatpin, jewellery, handbag, bootlace, glove, stocking, lingerie.  Each was the product of many arts in co-ordination.  Each was of great price.  And there were thousands of them.  They were as cheap as periwinkles.  George thought:  “This is Paris.”

He said aloud: 

“Seems to be a fine lot of new clothes knocking about.”

Evidently for Lois his tone was too impressed, not sufficiently casual.  She replied in her condescending manner, which he detested: 

“My poor George, considering that this is the opening of the spring season, and the place where all the new spring fashions are tried out—­what did you expect?”

The dolt had not known that he was assisting at a solemnity recognized as such by experts throughout the clothed world.  But Lois knew all those things.  She herself was trying out a new toilette, for which doubtless Irene Wheeler was partly sponsor.  She could hold her own on the terraces with the rest.  She was staggeringly different now from the daughter of the simple home in the Rue d’Athenes.

The eyes of the splendid women aroused George’s antipathy, because he seemed to detect antipathy in them—­not against himself but against the male in him.  These women, though by their glances they largely mistrusted and despised each other, had the air of having combined sexually against a whole sex.  The situation was very contradictory.  They had beautified and ornamented themselves in order to attract a whole sex, and yet they appeared to resent the necessity and instinct to attract.  They submitted with a secret repugnance to the mysterious and supreme bond which kept the sexes inexorably together.  And while stooping to fascinate, while deliberately seeking attention, they still had the assured mien of conquerors.  Their eyes said that they knew they were indispensable, that they had a transcendent role to play, that no concealed baseness of the inimical sex was hidden from them, and that they meant to exploit their position to the full.  These Latin women exhibited a logic, an elegance, and a frankness beyond the reach of the Anglo-Saxon.  Their eyes said not that they had been disillusioned, but rather that they had never had illusions.  They admitted the facts; they admitted everything—­economic dependence, chicane, the intention to seize every advantage, ruthless egotism.  They had no shame for a depravity which they shared equally with the inescapable and cherished enemy And it was the youngest who, beneath the languishing and the softness and the invitation deceitful and irresistible, gazed outmost