“But I shall be at Granny’s—­for the present that is,” she added, as if conscious that her change of plans required some explanation.

“Somewhere where we can be alone,” he insisted.

She gave a faint laugh that grated on him.

“In New York?  But there are no churches . . . no monuments.”

“There’s the Art Museum—­in the Park,” he explained, as she looked puzzled.  “At half-past two.  I shall be at the door . . .”

She turned away without answering and got quickly into the carriage.  As it drove off she leaned forward, and he thought she waved her hand in the obscurity.  He stared after her in a turmoil of contradictory feelings.  It seemed to him that he had been speaking not to the woman he loved but to another, a woman he was indebted to for pleasures already wearied of:  it was hateful to find himself the prisoner of this hackneyed vocabulary.

“She’ll come!” he said to himself, almost contemptuously.

Avoiding the popular “Wolfe collection,” whose anecdotic canvases filled one of the main galleries of the queer wilderness of cast-iron and encaustic tiles known as the Metropolitan Museum, they had wandered down a passage to the room where the “Cesnola antiquities” mouldered in unvisited loneliness.

They had this melancholy retreat to themselves, and seated on the divan enclosing the central steam-radiator, they were staring silently at the glass cabinets mounted in ebonised wood which contained the recovered fragments of Ilium.

“It’s odd,” Madame Olenska said, “I never came here before.”

“Ah, well—.  Some day, I suppose, it will be a great Museum.”

“Yes,” she assented absently.

She stood up and wandered across the room.  Archer, remaining seated, watched the light movements of her figure, so girlish even under its heavy furs, the cleverly planted heron wing in her fur cap, and the way a dark curl lay like a flattened vine spiral on each cheek above the ear.  His mind, as always when they first met, was wholly absorbed in the delicious details that made her herself and no other.  Presently he rose and approached the case before which she stood.  Its glass shelves were crowded with small broken objects—­hardly recognisable domestic utensils, ornaments and personal trifles—­made of glass, of clay, of discoloured bronze and other time-blurred substances.

“It seems cruel,” she said, “that after a while nothing matters . . . any more than these little things, that used to be necessary and important to forgotten people, and now have to be guessed at under a magnifying glass and labelled:  `Use unknown.’”

“Yes; but meanwhile—­”

“Ah, meanwhile—­”

As she stood there, in her long sealskin coat, her hands thrust in a small round muff, her veil drawn down like a transparent mask to the tip of her nose, and the bunch of violets he had brought her stirring with her quickly-taken breath, it seemed incredible that this pure harmony of line and colour should ever suffer the stupid law of change.