Valerie looked at her incredulously: 

“Do you think you would really care to know me?  I, an artist’s model, and you, the Countess d’Enver?”

“I was Nellie Jackson before that.”  She leaned across the table, smiling, with heightened colour; “I believe I’d never have to pretend with you.  The minute I saw you I liked you.  Will you let me talk to you?”

“Y—­yes.”

There was a constrained silence; Helene d’Enver touched the water in the bowl with her finger-tips, dried them, looked up at Valerie, who rose.  Under the window there was a tufted seat; and here they found places together.

“Do you know why I came?” asked Helene d’Enver.  “I was lonely.”

“You!”

“My dear, I am a lonely woman; I’m lonely to desperation.  I don’t belong in New York and I don’t belong in France, and I don’t like Pittsburgh.  I’m lonely!  I’ve always been lonely ever since I left Pittsburgh.  There doesn’t seem to be any definite place anywhere for me.  And I haven’t a real woman friend in the world!”

“How in the world can you say that?” exclaimed Valerie, astonished.

The countess lighted another cigarette and wreathed her pretty face in smoke.

“You think because I have a title and am presentable that I can go anywhere?” She smiled.  “The society I might care for hasn’t the slightest interest in me.  There is in this city a kind of society recruited largely from the fashionable hotels and from among those who have no fixed social position in New York—­people who are never very far outside or inside the edge of things—­but who never penetrate any farther.”  She laughed.  “This society camps permanently at the base of the Great Wall of China.  But it never scales it.”

“Watch the men on Fifth Avenue,” she went on.  “Some walk there as though they do not belong there; some walk as though they do belong there; some, as though they lived there.  I move about as though I belonged where I am occasionally seen; but I’m tired of pretending that I live there.”

She leaned back among the cushions, dropping one knee over the other and tossing away her cigarette.  And her little suede shoe swung nervously to and fro.

“You’re the first girl I’ve seen in New York who, I believe, really doesn’t care what I am—­and I don’t care what she is.  Shall we be friends?  I’m lonely.”

Valerie looked at her, diffidently: 

“I haven’t had very much experience in friendship—­except with Rita Tevis,” she said.

“Will you let me take you to drive sometimes?”

“I’d love to, only you see I am in business.”

“Of course I mean after hours.”

“Thank you....  But I usually am expected—­to tea—­and dinner—­”

Helene lay back among the cushions, looking at her.

“Haven’t you any time at all for me?” she asked, wistfully.

Valerie was thinking of Neville:  “Not—­very—­much I am afraid—­”