She could not finish.

“And Mrs. Moncreiff, if I’ve got the name right, is she with us, too?” asked Rosamund, miraculously urbane.  And added:  “I hear she has wealth and is the mistress of it.”

Audrey jumped up, smiling, and lifting her veil.  She could not help smiling.  The studio, the lamp, Rosamund with her miraculous self-complacency, Nick with her soft, mad eyes and wistful voice, the blundering ruthless Miss Ingate, all seemed intensely absurd to her.  Everything seemed absurd except dancing and revelry and coloured lights and strange disguises and sensuous contacts.  She had the most careless contempt, stiffened by a slight loathing, for political movements and every melancholy effort to reform the world.  The world did not need reforming and did not want to be reformed.

“Perhaps you don’t know my story,” Audrey began, not realising how she would continue.  “I am a widow.  I made an unhappy marriage.  My husband on the day after our wedding-day began to eat peas with his knife.  In a week I was forced to leave him.  And a fortnight later I heard that he was dead of blood-poisoning.  He had cut his mouth.”

And she thought: 

“What is the matter with me?  I have ruined myself.”  All her exultation had collapsed.

But Rosamund remarked gravely: 

“It is a common story.”

Suddenly there was a movement in the obscure corner where sat the unnamed and unintroduced lady.  This lady rose and came towards the table.  She was very elegant in dress and manner, and she looked maturely young.

“Madame Piriac,” announced Rosamund.

Audrey recoiled....  Gazing hard at the face, she saw in it a vague but undeniable resemblance to certain admired photographs which had arrived at Moze from France.

“Pardon me!” said Madame Piriac in English with a strong French accent.  “I shall like very much to hear the details of this story of petits pois.”  The tone of Madame Piriac’s question was unexceptionable; it took account of Audrey’s mourning attire, and of her youthfulness; but Audrey could formulate no answer to it.  Instead of speaking she gave a touch to her veil, and it dropped before her piquant, troubled, inscrutable face like a screen.

Miss Ingate said with noticeable calm, but also with the air of a conspirator who sees danger to a most secret machination: 

“I’m afraid Mrs. Moncreiff won’t care to go into details.”

It was neatly done.  Madame Piriac brought the episode to a close with a sympathetic smile and an apposite gesture.  And Audrey, safe behind her veil, glanced gratefully and admiringly at Miss Ingate, who, taken quite unawares, had been so surprisingly able thus to get her out of a scrape.  She felt very young and callow among these three women, and the mere presence of Madame Piriac, of whom years ago she had created for herself a wondrous image, put her into a considerable flutter.  On the whole she was ready to believe that the actual Madame Piriac was quite equal to the image of her founded on photographs and letters.  She set her teeth, and decided that Madame Piriac should not learn her identity—­yet!  There was little risk of her discovering it for herself, for no photograph of Audrey had gone to Paris for a dozen years, and Miss Ingate’s loyalty was absolute.