Doctor John’s personal attitude and bearing toward Feilding was an enigma not only to Jane, but to others who saw it.  He invariably greeted him, whenever they met, with marked, almost impressive cordiality, but it never passed a certain limit of reserve; a certain dignity of manner which Max had recognized the first day he shook hands with him.  It recalled to Feilding some of his earlier days, when he was a student in Paris.  There had been a supper in Max’s room that ended at daylight—­no worse in its features than dozens of others in the Quartier—­ to which an intimate friend of the doctor’s had been invited, and upon which, as Max heard afterward, the doctor had commented rather severely.

Max realized, therefore, but too well that the distinguished physician—­known now over half the State —­understood him, and his habits, and his kind as thoroughly as he did his own ease of instruments.  He realized, too, that there was nothing about his present appearance or surroundings or daily life that could lead so thoughtful a man of the world as Dr. John Cavendish, of Barnegat, to conclude that he had changed in any way for the better.

And yet this young gentleman could never have been accused of burning his candle at both ends.  He had no flagrant vices really—­none whose posters were pasted on the victim’s face.  Neither cards nor any other form of play interested him, nor did the wine tempt him when it was red—­or of any other color, for that matter, nor did he haunt the dressing-rooms of chorus girls and favorites of the hour.  His innate refinement and good taste prevented any such uses of his spare time.  His weakness—­for it could hardly be called a vice—­was narrowed down to one infirmity, and one only:  this was his inability to be happy without the exclusive society of some one woman.

Who the woman might be depended very largely on whom he might be thrown with.  In the first ten years of his majority—­his days of poverty when a student—­it had been some girl in exile, like himself.  During the last ten years—­since his father’s death and his inheritance—­it had been a loose end picked out of the great floating drift—­that social flotsam and jetsam which eddies in and out of the casinos of Nice and Monte Carlo, flows into Aix and Trouville in summer and back again to Rome and Cairo in winter—­a discontented wife perhaps; or an unmarried woman of thirty-five or forty, with means enough to live where she pleased; or it might be some self-exiled Russian countess or English-woman of quality who had a month off, and who meant to make the most of it.  All most respectable people, of course, without a breath of scandal attaching to their names—­Max was too careful for that—­ and yet each and every one on the lookout for precisely the type of man that Max represented:  one never happy or even contented when outside the radius of a waving fan or away from the flutter of a silken skirt.

It was in one of these resorts of the idle, a couple of years before, while Lucy’s husband and little Ellen were home in Geneva, that Max had met her, and where he had renewed the acquaintance of their childhood —­an acquaintance which soon ripened into the closest friendship.