“How are you?” he said.  “You’ve been to see the Queen, I suppose?  Did you have a good crossing?”

In this way he greeted her from whom he hoped for a grandson of his name.

Gazing at him, so old, thin, white, and spotless, Annette murmured something in French which James did not understand.

“Yes, yes,” he said, “you want your lunch, I expect.  Soames, ring the bell; we won’t wait for that chap Dartie.”  But just then they arrived.  Dartie had refused to go out of his way to see ‘the old girl.’  With an early cocktail beside him, he had taken a ‘squint’ from the smoking-room of the Iseeum, so that Winifred and Imogen had been obliged to come back from the Park to fetch him thence.  His brown eyes rested on Annette with a stare of almost startled satisfaction.  The second beauty that fellow Soames had picked up!  What women could see in him!  Well, she would play him the same trick as the other, no doubt; but in the meantime he was a lucky devil!  And he brushed up his moustache, having in nine months of Green Street domesticity regained almost all his flesh and his assurance.  Despite the comfortable efforts of Emily, Winifred’s composure, Imogen’s enquiring friendliness, Dartie’s showing-off, and James’ solicitude about her food, it was not, Soames felt, a successful lunch for his bride.  He took her away very soon.

“That Monsieur Dartie,” said Annette in the cab, “je n’aime pas ce type-la!”

“No, by George!” said Soames.

“Your sister is veree amiable, and the girl is pretty.  Your father is veree old.  I think your mother has trouble with him; I should not like to be her.”

Soames nodded at the shrewdness, the clear hard judgment in his young wife; but it disquieted him a little.  The thought may have just flashed through him, too:  ’When I’m eighty she’ll be fifty-five, having trouble with me!’

“There’s just one other house of my relations I must take you to,” he said; “you’ll find it funny, but we must get it over; and then we’ll dine and go to the theatre.”

In this way he prepared her for Timothy’s.  But Timothy’s was different.  They were delighted to see dear Soames after this long long time; and so this was Annette!

“You are so pretty, my dear; almost too young and pretty for dear Soames, aren’t you?  But he’s very attentive and careful—­such a good hush....”  Aunt Juley checked herself, and placed her lips just under each of Annette’s eyes—­she afterwards described them to Francie, who dropped in, as:  “Cornflower-blue, so pretty, I quite wanted to kiss them.  I must say dear Soames is a perfect connoisseur.  In her French way, and not so very French either, I think she’s as pretty—­though not so distinguished, not so alluring—­as Irene.  Because she was alluring, wasn’t she? with that white skin and those dark eyes, and that hair, couleur de—­what was it?  I always forget.”

“Feuille morte,” Francie prompted.