“This is hopeless—­I’ll ask for a private room,” he said; and Madame Olenska, without offering any objection, waited while he went in search of it.  The room opened on a long wooden verandah, with the sea coming in at the windows.  It was bare and cool, with a table covered with a coarse checkered cloth and adorned by a bottle of pickles and a blueberry pie under a cage.  No more guileless-looking cabinet particulier ever offered its shelter to a clandestine couple:  Archer fancied he saw the sense of its reassurance in the faintly amused smile with which Madame Olenska sat down opposite to him.  A woman who had run away from her husband—­ and reputedly with another man—­was likely to have mastered the art of taking things for granted; but something in the quality of her composure took the edge from his irony.  By being so quiet, so unsurprised and so simple she had managed to brush away the conventions and make him feel that to seek to be alone was the natural thing for two old friends who had so much to say to each other. . . .

XXIV.

They lunched slowly and meditatively, with mute intervals between rushes of talk; for, the spell once broken, they had much to say, and yet moments when saying became the mere accompaniment to long duologues of silence.  Archer kept the talk from his own affairs, not with conscious intention but because he did not want to miss a word of her history; and leaning on the table, her chin resting on her clasped hands, she talked to him of the year and a half since they had met.

She had grown tired of what people called “society”; New York was kind, it was almost oppressively hospitable; she should never forget the way in which it had welcomed her back; but after the first flush of novelty she had found herself, as she phrased it, too “different” to care for the things it cared about—­and so she had decided to try Washington, where one was supposed to meet more varieties of people and of opinion.  And on the whole she should probably settle down in Washington, and make a home there for poor Medora, who had worn out the patience of all her other relations just at the time when she most needed looking after and protecting from matrimonial perils.

“But Dr. Carver—­aren’t you afraid of Dr. Carver?  I hear he’s been staying with you at the Blenkers’.”

She smiled.  “Oh, the Carver danger is over.  Dr. Carver is a very clever man.  He wants a rich wife to finance his plans, and Medora is simply a good advertisement as a convert.”

“A convert to what?”

“To all sorts of new and crazy social schemes.  But, do you know, they interest me more than the blind conformity to tradition—­somebody else’s tradition—­that I see among our own friends.  It seems stupid to have discovered America only to make it into a copy of another country.”  She smiled across the table.  “Do you suppose Christopher Columbus would have taken all that trouble just to go to the Opera with the Selfridge Merrys?”