“But you play, then!” he exclaimed, pleased.

“No, no!  I tap—­only.  And very little.”

He glanced through the pieces of music.  They were all, without exception, waltzes, by the once popular waltz-kings of Paris and Vienna, including several by the king of kings, Berger.  He seated himself at the piano and opened the first waltz that came.

“Oh!  I adore the waltzes of Berger,” she murmured.  “There is only he.  You don’t think so?”

He said he had never heard any of this music.  Then he played every piece for her.  He tried to see what it was in this music that so pleased the simple; and he saw it, or he thought he saw it.  He abandoned himself to the music, yielding to it, accepting its ideals, interpreting it as though it moved him, until in the end it did produce in him a sort of factitious emotion.  After all, it was no worse than much of the music he was forced to hear in very refined circles.

She said, ravished: 

“You decipher music like an angel.”

And hummed a fragment of the waltz from The Rosenkavalier which he had played for her two evenings earlier.  He glanced round sharply.  Had she, then, real taste?

“It is like that, isn’t it?” she questioned, and hummed it again, flattered by the look on his face.

While, at her invitation, he repeated the waltz on the piano, whose strings might have been made of zinc, he heard a ring at the outer door and then the muffled sound of a colloquy between a male voice and the voice of the Italian.  “Of course,” he admitted philosophically, “she has other clients already.”  Such a woman was bound to have other clients.  He felt no jealousy, nor even discomfort, from the fact that she lent herself to any male with sufficient money and a respectable appearance.  The colloquy expired.

“Ring, please,” she requested, after thanking him.  He hoped that she was not going to interrogate the Italian in his presence.  Surely she would be incapable of such clumsiness!  Still, women without imagination—­and the majority of women were without imagination—­did do the most astounding things.

There was no immediate answer to the bell; but in a few minutes the Italian entered with a tea-tray.  Christine sat up.

“I will pour the tea,” said she, and to the Italian:  “Marthe, where is the evening paper?” And when Marthe returned with a newspaper damp from the press, Christine said:  “To Monsieur....”

Not a word of curiosity as to the unknown visitor!

G.J. was amply confirmed in his original opinion of Christine.  She was one in a hundred.  To provide the evening paper....  It was nothing, but it was enormous.

“Sit by my side,” she said.  She made just a little space for him on the sofa—­barely enough so that he had to squeeze in.  The afternoon tea was correct, save for the extraordinary thickness of the bread-and-butter.  But G.J. said to himself that the French did not understand bread-and-butter, and the Italians still less.  To compensate for the defects of the bread-and-butter there was a box of fine chocolates.