to use the telephone.  Lois told him that he must come to lunch, and that afterwards he would be escorted to the races.  Dejection was instantly transformed into a gay excitation.  Proud of having spoken through a French telephone, he began to conceive romantically the interior of a Paris home—­he had seen naught but a studio or so with Mr. Enwright—­and to thrill at the prospect of Sunday races.  Not merely had he never seen a horse-race on a Sunday—­he had never seen a horse-race at all.  He perhaps was conscious of a genuine interest in Lois and her environment, but what most satisfied and flattered him, after his loneliness, was the bare fact of possessing social relations in Paris at all.

The Ingram home was up four flights of naked oaken stairs, fairly swept, in a plain, flat-fronted house.  The door of the home was opened by a dark, untidy, dishevelled, uncapped, fat girl, with a full apron, dazzling white and rectangularly creased, that had obviously just been taken out of a drawer.  Familiarly and amicably smiling, she led him into a small, modest drawing-room where were Lois and her father and mother.  Lois was enigmatic and taciturn.  Mr. and Mrs. Ingram were ingenuous, loquacious, and at ease.  Both of them had twinkling eyes.  Mrs. Ingram was rather stout and grey and small, and wore a quiet, inexpensive blue dress, embroidered at the neck in the Morrisian manner, of no kind of fashionableness.  She spoke in a low voice, smiled to herself with a benevolence that was not without a touch of the sardonic, and often looked at the floor or at the ceiling.  Mr. Ingram, very slim and neat, was quite as small as his wife, and seemed smaller.  He talked much and rather amusingly, in a somewhat mincing tone, as it were apologetically, truly anxious to please.  He had an extremely fair complexion, and his youthfulness was quite startling.  His golden hair and perfect teeth might have belonged to a boy.  George leapt immediately into familiarity with these two.  But nobody could have less resembled his preconceived image of ‘Parisian’ than Mr. Ingram.  And he could not understand a bit whence or how such a pair had produced their daughter Lois.  Laurencine was a far more comprehensible offspring for them.

The dining-room was even less spacious than the drawing-room, and as unpretentious.  The furniture everywhere was sparse, but there were one or two rich knick-knacks, and an abundance of signed photographs.  The few pictures, too, were signed, and they drew attention.  On the table the napkins, save George’s, were in rings, and each ring different from the others.  George’s napkin had the air of a wealthy, stiff, shiny relative of the rest.  Evidently in that home the long art of making both ends meet was daily practised.  George grew light-hearted and happy, despite the supreme preoccupation which only a telegram could allay.  He had keenly the sensation of being abroad.  The multiplicity of doors, the panelling of the doors, the narrow planking of the oaken floor,