She said the words “my husband” as if no sinister associations were connected with them, and in a tone that seemed almost to sigh over the lost delights of her married life.  Archer looked at her perplexedly, wondering if it were lightness or dissimulation that enabled her to touch so easily on the past at the very moment when she was risking her reputation in order to break with it.

“I do think,” she went on, addressing both men, “that the imprevu adds to one’s enjoyment.  It’s perhaps a mistake to see the same people every day.”

“It’s confoundedly dull, anyhow; New York is dying of dullness,” Beaufort grumbled.  “And when I try to liven it up for you, you go back on me.  Come—­think better of it!  Sunday is your last chance, for Campanini leaves next week for Baltimore and Philadelphia; and I’ve a private room, and a Steinway, and they’ll sing all night for me.”

“How delicious!  May I think it over, and write to you tomorrow morning?”

She spoke amiably, yet with the least hint of dismissal in her voice.  Beaufort evidently felt it, and being unused to dismissals, stood staring at her with an obstinate line between his eyes.

“Why not now?”

“It’s too serious a question to decide at this late hour.”

“Do you call it late?”

She returned his glance coolly.  “Yes; because I have still to talk business with Mr. Archer for a little while.”

“Ah,” Beaufort snapped.  There was no appeal from her tone, and with a slight shrug he recovered his composure, took her hand, which he kissed with a practised air, and calling out from the threshold:  “I say, Newland, if you can persuade the Countess to stop in town of course you’re included in the supper,” left the room with his heavy important step.

For a moment Archer fancied that Mr. Letterblair must have told her of his coming; but the irrelevance of her next remark made him change his mind.

“You know painters, then?  You live in their milieu?” she asked, her eyes full of interest.

“Oh, not exactly.  I don’t know that the arts have a milieu here, any of them; they’re more like a very thinly settled outskirt.”

“But you care for such things?”

“Immensely.  When I’m in Paris or London I never miss an exhibition.  I try to keep up.”

She looked down at the tip of the little satin boot that peeped from her long draperies.

“I used to care immensely too:  my life was full of such things.  But now I want to try not to.”

“You want to try not to?”

“Yes:  I want to cast off all my old life, to become just like everybody else here.”

Archer reddened.  “You’ll never be like everybody else,” he said.

She raised her straight eyebrows a little.  “Ah, don’t say that.  If you knew how I hate to be different!”

Her face had grown as sombre as a tragic mask.  She leaned forward, clasping her knee in her thin hands, and looking away from him into remote dark distances.