As Lady Orange was going to Bucharest shortly, and desired an introduction to august personages there, she thought it best to humour the general's whim.
"How well you express yourself in our barbarous tongue, M. le Général," she said kindly.
"Ah, madame," the general replied, with an expressive shrug, "we in our country are at such disadvantage in the social life of great cities like London and Paris, that we must strive to win our way by mastering the intricacies of language, so as to enable us to converse freely with the intelligentsia of the West who honour us by their gracious acceptance."
"You are a born courtier, Monsieur le Général," Lady Orange rejoined with a gracious smile. "Is he not, ma chère?" And with the edge of her large feather fan she tapped the knees of an elderly lady who sat the other side of M. le Général.
"Oh, Mademoiselle Fairfax was not listening to my foolish remarks," General Naniescu said, turning the battery of his mellow eyes on the somewhat frumpish old maid.
"No," Miss Fairfax admitted drily. "Monsieur de Kervoisin here on my left was busy trying to convert me to the dullness of Marcel Proust. He is not succeeding."
"Ah!" exclaimed Naniescu suavely, "you English ladies! You are so intellectual and so deliciously obstinate. So proud of your glorious literature that even the French modernists appear poor in your sight."
"There, you see, ma chère," Lady Orange put in with her habitual vagueness, "always the courtier."
"How can one help being a courtier, dear lady, when for hours one is thrown in a veritable whirlpool of beauty, brilliance and wit? Look at this dazzling throng before us," the general went on, with a fine sweep of his arm. "The eyes are nearly blinded with its magnificence. Is it not so, my dear Kervoisin?"
This last remark he made in French, for M. de Kervoisin spoke not a word of English. He was a small, spare man, with thin grey beard neatly trimmed into a point, and thin grey hair carefully arranged so as to conceal the beginnings of baldness. Around his deep-set grey eyes there was a network of wrinkles; they were shrewd, piercing eyes, with little, if any, softness in them. M. de Kervoisin, whose name proclaimed him a native of Brittany, was financial adviser to a multiplicity of small, newly created states, all of whom were under the tutelage of France. His manner was quiet and self-effacing when social or political questions were on the tapis, and he only appeared to warm up when literature or the arts were being discussed. He fancied himself as a Mæcenas rather than a financier. Marcel Proust was his hobby for the moment, because above all things he prided himself on modernity, and on his desire to keep abreast of every literary and artistic movement that had risen in the one country that he deemed of intellectual importance, namely his own.