Bonaparte prince, on the moribund German Jesuit to whom he was listening, on the darkly supple young Spanish priest, on the rosy-gilled English Passionist, on Radet, the writer of that article in the Revue Rouge, who was talking to a compatriot in one of the tall windows.  She seemed to accept the saturnine-looking men, the political women, who all spoke a language not their own, with an accent and a fluency, and a dangerous far-away smile and a display of questionable teeth all their own.  She seemed to class the political with the pious, the obvious adventurer with the seeming fanatic.  It was amazing to me to see her there, standing with her county family self-possession in the midst of so much that was questionable.  She offered me no explanation; I had to find one for myself.

We stood and talked in the centre of the room.  It did not seem a place in which one could sit.

“Why have you never been to see me?” she asked languidly.  “I might never have known of your existence if it had not been for your sister.”  My sister was standing at my side, you must remember.  I don’t suppose that I started, but I made my aunt no answer.

“Indeed,” she went on, “I should never have known that you had a sister.  Your father was so very peculiar.  From the day he married, my husband never heard a word from him.”

“They were so very different,” I said, listlessly.

“Ah, yes,” she answered, “brothers so often are.”  She sighed, apropos of nothing.  She continued to utter disjointed sentences from which I gathered a skeleton history of my soi distant sister’s introduction of herself and of her pretensions.  She had, it seemed, casually introduced herself at some garden-party or function of the sort, had represented herself as a sister of my own to whom a maternal uncle had left a fabulous fortune.  She herself had suggested her being sheltered under my aunt’s roof as a singularly welcome “paying guest.”  She herself, too, had suggested the visit to Paris and had hired the house from a degenerate Duc de Luynes who preferred the delights of an appartement in the less lugubrious Avenue Marceau.

“We have tastes so much in common,” my aunt explained, as she moved away to welcome a new arrival.  I was left alone with the woman who called herself my sister.

We stood a little apart.  Each little group of talkers in the vast room seemed to stand just without earshot of the next.  I had my back to the door, my face to her.

“And so you have come,” she said, maliciously it seemed to me.

It was impossible to speak in such a position; in such a place; impossible to hold a discussion on family affairs when a diminutive Irishwoman with too mobile eyebrows, and a couple of gigantic, raw-boned, lugubrious Spaniards, were in a position to hear anything that one uttered above a whisper.  One might want to raise one’s voice.  Besides, she was so—­so terrible; there was no knowing what she might not say.  She so obviously did not care what the Irish or the Spaniards or the Jesuits heard or thought, that I was forced to the mortifying conclusion that I did.