was when he was interested; he looked intensely serious.  I was glad that, having her back to him, she was unable to see how he looked.  It seemed the proper moment to present myself and make her my bow; but just as I was about to leave my place a gentleman, whom in a moment I perceived to be an old acquaintance, came to occupy the next chair.  Recognition and mutual greetings followed, and I was forced to postpone my visit to Madame Blumenthal.  I was not sorry, for it very soon occurred to me that Niedermeyer would be just the man to give me a fair prose version of Pickering’s lyric tributes to his friend.  He was an Austrian by birth, and had formerly lived about Europe a great deal in a series of small diplomatic posts.  England especially he had often visited, and he spoke the language almost without accent.  I had once spent three rainy days with him in the house of an English friend in the country.  He was a sharp observer, and a good deal of a gossip; he knew a little something about every one, and about some people everything.  His knowledge on social matters generally had the quality of all German science; it was copious, minute, exhaustive.

“Do tell me,” I said, as we stood looking round the house, “who and what is the lady in white, with the young man sitting behind her.”

“Who?” he answered, dropping his glass.  “Madame Blumenthal!  What!  It would take long to say.  Be introduced; it’s easily done; you will find her charming.  Then, after a week, you will tell me what she is.”

“Perhaps I should not.  My friend there has known her a week, and I don’t think he is yet able to give a coherent account of her.”

He raised his glass again, and after looking a while, “I am afraid your friend is a little—­what do you call it?—­a little ‘soft.’  Poor fellow! he’s not the first.  I have never known this lady that she has not had some eligible youth hovering about in some such attitude as that, undergoing the softening process.  She looks wonderfully well, from here.  It’s extraordinary how those women last!”

“You don’t mean, I take it, when you talk about ‘those women,’ that Madame Blumenthal is not embalmed, for duration, in a certain infusion of respectability?”

“Yes and no.  The atmosphere that surrounds her is entirely of her own making.  There is no reason in her antecedents that people should drop their voice when they speak of her.  But some women are never at their ease till they have given some damnable twist or other to their position before the world.  The attitude of upright virtue is unbecoming, like sitting too straight in a fauteuil.  Don’t ask me for opinions, however; content yourself with a few facts and with an anecdote.  Madame Blumenthal is Prussian, and very well born.  I remember her mother, an old Westphalian Grafin, with principles marshalled out like Frederick the Great’s grenadiers.  She was poor, however, and her principles were an insufficient dowry for