It was, she explained meditatively, an escape (he noticed that it was the second time that she had used that word).  The Hotel Bungalow was very clean, the food was good, the air was marvellous....

She pulled herself together.

When you took a holiday, she said, you had to make a careful choice between old acquaintances and new ones.  Which was likely to be the more tiring?  She herself always went to new places at the wrong time of year.  Then it was a case of friendship, or nothing.  The people who visited watering places out of season were always either impossible or enchanting.  Very often amusingly impossible and temporarily enchanting, but so much the better.  There is a certain safety in the transitory.

Is Madame married?  Maurice asked abruptly.  It was the sort of question that had to be asked brusquely, or not at all.

“Yes—­No—­Yes.  That is to say, I have a husband.  He will probably come here for a day or two later.  He is tres comme il faut.”

“Surely you do not blame him for coming to see you.”

She shrugged her shoulders.

“It is magnificent, but it is not life.  One is not always young enough to permit oneself these phantasies.  At fifty-six it is silly to waste two days visiting some one you don’t want to see.  But there, Edmond is like that.  Oh! the stability when he says ‘my wife.’  It is superb.  It must be grand, too, when he says ‘ma maitresse’; he has the property sense.  And how he adores women, woman, all women, any woman.  Even sometimes me.  And when he doesn’t, he keeps the habits.  Toujours des petits soins.  He never goes out of training, even at home.”

“He sounds charming to live with.”

“Ah, yes.  That is it.  He is charming.  One cannot bear it.  To have the five-finger exercises of his irresistibility played on one.  To be the stiff piano on which he practises but never plays.  It is too much.  And one remembers the days when one was the concert grand.  Pouf.  It is not agreeable.”

There was a pause.  Maurice knew that she was going to say a great many other things.

But they had reached the Hotel Bungalow.  Regretfully they parted.

He thought that she was a very remarkable woman indeed.

She thought how like her husband he was.  Her husband twenty-five years ago.

At dinner she still was in black and white.  Black covered with filmy laces, soft and shadowy and mysterious.  After dinner they sat on the terrace and looked out at the inky relentless sea.

“Being sensible is no good at all,” she said with sudden passion.  “Courage is the only helpful virtue; when I married I was young and very pretty and I had thought about life a lot.  I knew that in men fidelity had the importance that they gave to it.  To a few—­very few—­it matters—­but in most cases unfaithfulness is not a psychological thing at all; it is simply a temporary excess like getting drunk—­squalid,