tense and speculative scrutiny. The girl was looking about her with a naïve interest in the people who sat near them. Her whole manner was one of a vast wonder, as if she thought, "I, Ellen Tolliver, lunching at the Ritz in Paris. It is not possible that I am awake!" Miss Schönberg must have seen that she was still a bit crude, still not quite free of the multitude, but she had an unmistakable air, a certain distinction born in her which had to do with the superb poise of the head, the slight arch of the nose and the line of the throat. It had been sharpened and polished mysteriously during the few months in Paris. The clothes were right for her style . . . simple almost to severity, fitting the tall, strong, energetic body to perfection. They came from dressmakers, Miss Schönberg reflected, who knew their business. Madame Shane must have had taste to have guided the girl so well. A touch here and there and she would be perfect. What she lacked was a sense of the bizarre which the public expected from artists. There was plenty of time to accomplish that. . . .
"As I was saying," continued Miss Schönberg, over her coupe marron, "vitality is everything. I once saw Mary Garden at a rehearsal on a stage cluttered by the jumbled scenery of Pelléas and Melisande. There were scores of people on the stage . . . carpenters, musicians, a director, journalists . . . all alive and moving about, but one didn't see them. One saw only Mary moving back and forth, in and out among them. No one else existed. It was a case of vitality. She is ninety-nine per cent. vitality . . . nothing else. She hypnotizes the public. Why, she has even adapted the French language to suit her own ideas."
The men and women who sat at the adjoining tables must have found them an interesting pair; they were both so neat, so trim, so raffiné. It was not without reason that more than one person, in the years that followed, spoke of Ellen as resembling a fine greyhound. The one, it was plain, was a Jewess and very likely, if one could judge from the bright shrewd eyes, a clever one. The other might have been anything . . . Russian,
