Gerald insisted on meeting his wife’s gaze as he finished these revelations.  He pretended that such stories were the commonest things on earth, and that to be scandalized by them was infantile.  Sophia, thrust suddenly into a strange civilization perfectly frank in its sensuality and its sensuousness, under the guidance of a young man to whom her half-formed intelligence was a most diverting toy—­Sophia felt mysteriously uncomfortable, disturbed by sinister, flitting phantoms of ideas which she only dimly apprehended.  Her eyes fell.  Gerald laughed self-consciously.  She would not eat any more pineapple.

Immediately afterwards there came into the restaurant an apparition which momentarily stopped every conversation in the room.  It was a tall and mature woman who wore over a dress of purplish-black silk a vast flowing sortie de bal of vermilion velvet, looped and tasselled with gold.  No other costume could live by the side of that garment, Arab in shape, Russian in colour, and Parisian in style.  It blazed.  The woman’s heavy coiffure was bound with fillets of gold braid and crimson rosettes.  She was followed by a young Englishman in evening dress and whiskers of the most exact correctness.  The woman sailed, a little breathlessly, to a table next to Gerald’s, and took possession of it with an air of use, almost of tedium.  She sat down, threw the cloak from her majestic bosom, and expanded her chest.  Seeming to ignore the Englishman, who superciliously assumed the seat opposite to her, she let her large scornful eyes travel round the restaurant, slowly and imperiously meeting the curiosity which she had evoked.  Her beauty had undoubtedly been dazzling, it was still effulgent; but the blossom was about to fall.  She was admirably rouged and powdered; her arms were glorious; her lashes were long.  There was little fault, save the excessive ripeness of a blonde who fights in vain against obesity.  And her clothes combined audacity with the propriety of fashion.  She carelessly deposed costly trinkets on the table, and then, having intimidated the whole company, she accepted the menu from the head-waiter and began to study it.

“That’s one of ’em!” Gerald whispered to Sophia.

“One of what?” Sophia whispered.

Gerald raised his eyebrows warningly, and winked.  The Englishman had overheard; and a look of frigid displeasure passed across his proud face.  Evidently he belonged to a rank much higher than Gerald’s; and Gerald, though he could always comfort himself by the thought that he had been to a university with the best, felt his own inferiority and could not hide that he felt it.  Gerald was wealthy; he came of a wealthy family; but he had not the habit of wealth.  When he spent money furiously, he did it with bravado, too conscious of grandeur and too conscious of the difficulties of acquiring that which he threw away.  For Gerald had earned money.  This whiskered Englishman had never earned money, never known the value of it,