I turned eagerly. It was the Dimensionist girl. She continued talking to Miss Churchill. “We meet so seldom, and we are never upon terms,” she said lightly. “I assure you we are like cat and dog.” She came toward me and the blond maidens disappeared, everybody, everything disappeared. I had not seen her for nearly a year. I had vaguely gathered from Miss Churchill that she was regarded as a sister of mine, that she had, with wealth inherited from a semi-fabulous Australian uncle, revived the glories of my aunt’s house. I had never denied it, because I did not want to interfere with my aunt’s attempts to regain some of the family’s prosperity. It even had my sympathy to a small extent, for, after all, the family was my family too.
As a memory my pseudo-sister had been something bright and clear-cut and rather small; seen now, she was something that one could not look at for glow. She moved toward me, smiling and radiant, as a ship moves beneath towers of shining canvas. I was simply overwhelmed. I don’t know what she said, what I said, what she did or I. I have an idea that we conversed for some minutes. I remember that she said, at some point,
“Go away now; I want to talk to Mr. Gurnard.”
As a matter of fact, Gurnard was making toward her—a deliberate, slow progress. She greeted him with nonchalance, as, beneath eyes, a woman greets a man she knows intimately. I found myself hating him, thinking that he was not the sort of man she ought to know.
“It’s settled?” she asked him, as he came within range. He looked at me inquiringly—insolently. She said, “My brother,” and he answered:
“Oh, yes,” as I moved away. I hated the man and I could not keep my eyes off him and her. I went and stood against the mantelpiece. The Duc de Mersch bore down upon them, and I welcomed his interruption until I saw that he, too, was intimate with her, intimate with a pomposity of flourishes as irritating as Gurnard’s nonchalance.
I stood there and glowered at them. I noted her excessive beauty; her almost perilous self-possession while she stood talking to those two men. Of me there was nothing left but the eyes. I had no mind, no thoughts. I saw the three figures go through the attitudes of conversation—she very animated, de Mersch grotesquely empressé, Gurnard undisguisedly saturnine. He repelled me exactly as grossly vulgar men had the power of doing, but he, himself, was not that—there was something … something. I could not quite make out his face, I never could. I never did, any more than I could ever quite visualise hers. I wondered vaguely how Churchill could work in harness with such a man, how he could bring himself to be closeted, as he had just been, with him and with a fool like de Mersch—I should have been afraid.
As for de Mersch, standing between those two, he seemed like a country lout between confederate sharpers. It struck me that she let me see, made me see, that she and Gurnard had an understanding, made manifest to me by glances that passed when the Duc had his unobservant eyes turned elsewhere.
I saw Churchill, in turn, move desultorily toward them, drawn in, like a straw toward a little whirlpool. I turned my back in a fury of jealousy.
IX
I had a pretty bad night after that, and was not much in the mood for Fox on the morrow. The sight of her had dwarfed everything; the thought of her disgusted me with everything, made me out of conceit with the world—with that part of the world that had become my world. I wanted to get up into hers—and I could not see any way. The room in which Fox sat seemed to be hopelessly off the road—to be hopelessly off any road to any place; to be the end of a blind alley. One day I might hope to occupy such a room—in my shirtsleeves, like Fox. But that was not the end of my career—not the end that I desired. She had upset me.
“You’ve just missed Polehampton,” Fox said; “wanted to get hold of your ‘Atmospheres.’ ”
“Oh, damn Polehampton,” I said, “and particularly damn the ‘Atmospheres.’ ”
“Willingly,” Fox said, “but I told Mr. P. that you were willing if. …”
“I don’t want to know,” I repeated. “I tell you I’m sick of the things.”
“What a change,” he asserted, sympathetically, “I thought you would.”
It struck me as disgusting that a person like Fox should think about me at all. “Oh, I’ll see it through,” I said. “Who’s the next?”
“We’ve got to have the Duc de Mersch now,” he answered, “De Mersch as State Founder—written as large as you can—all across the page. The moment’s come and we’ve got to rope it in, that’s all. I’ve been middling good to you. … You understand. …”
He began to explain in his dark sentences. The time had come for an energetically engineered boom in de Mersch—a boom all along the line. And I was to commence the campaign. Fox had been good to me and I was to repay him. I listened in a sort of apathetic indifference.
“Oh, very well,” I said. I was subconsciously aware that, as far as I was concerned, the determining factor of the situation was the announcement that de Mersch was to be in Paris. If he had been in his own particular grand duchy I wouldn’t have gone after him. For a moment I thought of the interview as taking place in London. But Fox—ostensibly, at least—wasn’t even aware of de Mersch’s visit; spoke of him as being in Paris—in a flat in which he was accustomed to interview the continental financiers who took up so much of his time.
I realised that I wanted to go to Paris because she was there. She had said that she was going
