“My profound respect, mademoiselle, and my great sympathy.  And your father?”

“It’s awful for him.”

The painter said gently:  “Ah! mademoiselle, I am not so sure.  Perhaps he does not suffer so greatly.  Perhaps not even your trouble can hurt him very much.  He lives in a world apart.  That, I think, is his true tragedy to be alive, and yet not living enough to feel reality.  Do you know Anatole France’s description of an old woman:  ’Elle vivait, mais si peu.’  Would that not be well said of the Church in these days:  ’Elle vivait, mais si peu.’  I see him always like a rather beautiful dark spire in the night-time when you cannot see how it is attached to the earth.  He does not know, he never will know, Life.”

Noel looked round at him.  “What do you mean by Life, monsieur?  I’m always reading about Life, and people talk of seeing Life!  What is it—­where is it?  I never see anything that you could call Life.”

The painter smiled.

“To ’see life’!” he said.  “Ah! that is different.  To enjoy yourself!  Well, it is my experience that when people are ‘seeing life’ as they call it, they are not enjoying themselves.  You know when one is very thirsty one drinks and drinks, but the thirst remains all the same.  There are places where one can see life as it is called, but the only persons you will see enjoying themselves at such places are a few humdrums like myself, who go there for a talk over a cup of coffee.  Perhaps at your age, though, it is different.”

Noel clasped her hands, and her eyes seemed to shine in the gloom.  “I want music and dancing and light, and beautiful things and faces; but I never get them.”

“No, there does not exist in this town, or in any other, a place which will give you that.  Fox-trots and ragtime and paint and powder and glare and half-drunken young men, and women with red lips you can get them in plenty.  But rhythm and beauty and charm never.  In Brussels when I was younger I saw much ‘life’ as they call it, but not one lovely thing unspoiled; it was all as ashes in the mouth.  Ah! you may smile, but I know what I am talking of.  Happiness never comes when you are looking for it, mademoiselle; beauty is in Nature and in real art, never in these false silly make believes.  There is a place just here where we Belgians go; would you like to see how true my words are?

“Oh, yes!”

“Tres-bien!  Let us go in?”

They passed into a revolving doorway with little glass compartments which shot them out into a shining corridor.  At the end of this the painter looked at Noel and seemed to hesitate, then he turned off from the room they were about to enter into a room on the right.  It was large, full of gilt and plush and marble tables, where couples were seated; young men in khaki and older men in plain clothes, together or with young women.  At these last Noel looked, face after face, while they were passing down a long way to an empty table.  She saw that some were pretty, and some only trying to be, that nearly all were powdered and had their eyes darkened and their lips reddened, till she felt her own face to be dreadfully ungarnished:  Up in a gallery a small band was playing an attractive jingling hollow little tune; and the buzz of talk and laughter was almost deafening.