“Oh, I should ask it if I were you!” said Ste. Marie, at once.  “I’m an extremely good-natured person.  And, besides, I quite naturally feel flattered at your taking interest enough to ask anything about me.”

“Well,” said she, “it’s this:  Why does everybody call you just ’Ste. Marie’?  Most people are spoken of as Monsieur this or that—­if there isn’t a more august title; but they all call you Ste. Marie without any Monsieur.  It seems rather odd.”

Ste. Marie looked puzzled.  “Why,” he said, “I don’t believe I know, just.  I’d never thought of that.  It’s quite true, of course.  They never do use a Monsieur or anything, do they?  How cheeky of them!  I wonder why it is?  I’ll ask Hartley.”

He did ask Hartley later on, and Hartley didn’t know, either.  Miss Benham asked some other people, who were vague about it, and in the end she became convinced that it was an odd and quite inexplicable form of something like endearment.  But nobody seemed to have formulated it to himself.

“The name is really ‘De Ste. Marie,’” he went on, “and there’s a title that I don’t use, and a string of Christian names that one never employs.  My people were Bearnais, and there’s a heap of ruins on top of a hill in the Pyrenees where they lived.  It used to be Ste. Marie de Mont-les-Roses, but afterward, after the Revolution, they called it Ste. Marie de Mont Perdu.  My great-grandfather was killed there, but some old servants smuggled his little son away and saved him.”

He seemed to Miss Benham to say that in exactly the right manner, not in the cheap and scoffing fashion which some young men affect in speaking of ancestral fortunes or misfortunes, nor with too much solemnity.  And when she allowed a little silence to occur at the end, he did not go on with his family history, but turned at once to another subject.  It pleased her curiously.

The fair youth at her other side continued to crouch over his food, making fierce and animal-like noises.  He never spoke or seemed to wish to be spoken to, and Miss Benham found it easy to ignore him altogether.  It occurred to her once or twice that Ste. Marie’s other neighbor might desire an occasional word from him, but, after all, she said to herself that was his affair and beyond her control.  So these two talked together through the entire dinner period, and the girl was aware that she was being much more deeply affected by the simple, magnetic charm of a man than ever before in her life.  It made her a little angry, because she was unfamiliar with this sort of thing and distrusted it.  She was rather a perfect type of that phenomenon before which the British and Continental world stands in mingled delight and exasperation—­the American unmarried young woman, the creature of extraordinary beauty and still more extraordinary poise, the virgin with the bearing and savoir-faire of a woman of the world, the fresh-cheeked girl with the calm mind of a savante