stood that, without knowing it, she had been dressing of late to please a man, because she had found one who understood the beauty and importance of clothes. There was, despite all her other doubts, great satisfaction in that.
She discovered too that his friends were not among the Americans and the English but among the French and the Russians. She found herself, night after night, at dinners watching him as he stood, straight, dark and handsome, his queer gray eyes wrinkled a little with laughter, talking to some friend who was a foreigner, and at such moments she was aware of his great difference from her own people. He was, in some obscure fashion, linked with that preposterous boudoir and its florid decorations. Perhaps, secretly, he really liked the awful house as much as his mother liked it.
She saw too, with the green eyes which took in everything, that the women about her were intensely conscious of him, and she knew then that she had been at the same time lucky and tragically unlucky. It would be so easy for him . . . a man of so much intelligence and a beauty like that of a fine animal.
Toward the end of the first winter, a day or two after she had made certain that she was to have a baby, she interrupted her shopping long enough to have lunch at the Ritz. She had a table, alone, in one corner of the big room and, having no one to talk with her, she fell to observing the types at the other tables and reflecting upon the vulgarity and self-conscious glitter which marked the patrons of such hotels the world over. So she was startled when she found that the personality of some one who entered the room at that moment had the power of distracting her.
Two women came in together and stood for a time surveying the room. The one (it was she who was disturbing) was tall, slender and handsome, dressed smartly in a black suit with a black fur. The other, plainly a Jewess (who understood perfectly the manipulation of head-waiters) was small, with a ferrety,
