“Mon dieu,” she said, “j’ai grande envie de vous le dire.”  She hesitated the fraction of a moment, glanced at a tiny watch set in a ring upon the middle finger of her right hand, took Rose by the arm as if to keep her from getting away, and turned to her hostess.

“You must forgive me,” she said, “if I make my farewells a little soon.  I am under orders to have some air each day before I go to the theater, and if it is to be done to-day, it must be now.  I am sorry.  I have had a very pleasant afternoon.—­Make your farewells, also, my child,” she concluded, turning to her prisoner, “because you are going with me.”

There was something Olympian about the way she did it.  The excuse was made, and the regret expressed in the interest of courtesy, but neither was insisted on as a fact, nor was seriously intended, it appeared, even to disguise the fact, which was simply that she had found something better worth her while, for the moment, than that tea.  It occurred to Rose that there wasn’t a woman in town—­not even terrible old Mrs. Crawford, Constance’s mother-in-law, who could have done that thing in just that way; no one who felt herself detached, or, in a sense, superior enough, to have done it without a trace of self-consciousness, and consequently without offense.  An empress must do things a good deal like that.

The effect on Rose was to make complete frankness seem the easiest thing in the world.  And frankness seemed to be the thing called for.  Because no sooner were they seated in the actress’ car and headed north along the drive, than she, instead of answering Rose’s question, repeated one of her own.

“I ask who you are, and you say your name—­Rose something.  But that tells me nothing.  Who are you—­one of them?”

“No, not exactly,” said Rose.  “Only by accident.  The man I married is—­one of them, in a way.  I mean, because of his family and all that.  And so they take me in.”

“So you are married,” said the French woman.  “But not since long?”

“Six months,” said Rose.

She said it so with the air of regarding it as a very considerable period of time that Greville laughed.

“But tell me about him then, this husband of yours.  I saw him perhaps at the tea this afternoon?”

Rose laughed.  “No, he draws the line at teas,” she said.  “He says that from seven o’clock on, until as late as I like, he’s—­game, you know—­willing to do whatever I like.  But until seven, there are no—­well, he says, siren songs for him.”

“Tell me—­you will forgive the indiscretions of a stranger?—­how has it arrived that you married him?  Was it one of your American romances?”

“It didn’t seem very romantic,” said Rose.  “I mean not much like the romantic stories you read, and of course one couldn’t make a story about it, because there was nothing to tell.  We just happened to get acquainted, and we knew almost straight off that we wanted to marry each other, so we did.  Some people thought it was a little—­headlong, I suppose, but he said it was an adventure anyway, and that people could never tell how it was going to come out until they tried.  So we tried, and—­it came out very well.”