The two men leaned back in their chairs with long breaths, which Marise interpreted as relief.  “Strenuous, three of them at once, aren’t they?” she said.  “A New York friend of mine always says she can take the vibration-cure, only by listening to family talk at our table.”

“What’s the vibration-cure?” asked Mr. Welles seriously.

“Oh, I don’t know!” confessed Marise.  “I’m too busy to keep up with the latest fads in cures as Eugenia does.  You may meet her there this summer, by the way.  She usually spends a part of the summer with us.  She is a very old school-friend of mine.”

“French or Vermont incarnation?” inquired Marsh casually.  “May I smoke?  Won’t you have a cigarette, yourself?”

“Oh, French!” Marise was immensely amused, and then, remembering that the joke was not apparent, “If you’d ever seen her, even for a moment, you’d know why I laugh.  She is the embodiment of sophisticated cosmopolitanism, an expert on all sorts of esoteric, aesthetic and philosophic matters, book-binding, historic lace, the Vedanta creed, Chinese porcelains, Provencal poetry, Persian shawls . . .”

“What nationality is she, herself?” inquired Mr. Welles with some curiosity.

Marise laughed.  “She was born in Arkansas, and brought up in Minnesota, what did you suppose?  No European could ever take culture so seriously.  You know how any convert always has a thousand times more fervor than the fatigued members of the faith who were born to it.”

“Like Henry James, perhaps?” suggested Marsh.

“Yes, I always envied Henry James the conviction he seems to have had, all his life, that Europeans are a good deal more unlike other people than I ever found them.  It may be obtuseness on my part, but I never could see that people who lived in the Basses-Pyrenees are any more cultivated or had any broader horizons than people who live in the Green Mountains.  My own experience is that when you actually live with people, day after day, year after year, you find about the same range of possibilities in any group of them.  But I never advance this theory to Eugenia, who would be horrified to know that I find a strong family likeness between her New York circle and my neighbors here.”

She had been aware that Marsh was looking at her as she spoke.  What a singular, piercing eye he had!  It made her a little restive, as at a too-intimate contact, to be looked at so intently, although she was quite aware that there was a good deal of admiration in the look.  She wondered what he was thinking about her; for it was evident that he was thinking about her, as he sent out that penetrating gaze.

But perhaps not, after all; for he now said as if in answer to her last remark, “I have my own way of believing that, too, that all people are made of the same stuff.  Mostly I find them perfectly negligible, too utterly without savor even to glance at.  Once in a thousand years, it seems to me, you come across a human being who’s alive as you are, who speaks your language, is your own kind, belongs to you.  When you do, good Lord!  What a moment!”