"The balance is already on my side, dear hostess," he assured her. "You have left me an eternal debtor to your sex. I shall never again indulge in generalities or wholesale condemnation. It is, after all, foolish. But tell me why you are sending Lady Anne to help me to-day?"
She watched for any trace of disappointment in his tone. There was none. On the contrary, his mention of Lady Anne was accompanied by a slight eagerness which puzzled her.
"I have a few social duties to attend to," she explained a little vaguely. "Lady Anne is quite efficient. I like her handwriting, too. It is like herself—clean-cut, legible. There are no hidden pools about Lady Anne."
"Yet," he said, "a woman always keeps some part of herself concealed."
"You think that Lady Anne, too, has her secret?" Madame Christophor asked, raising her eyes.
"I think that if she has, she is quite capable of keeping it," he replied.
There was a knock at the door. Lady Anne entered. She came a few yards into the room with a slight smile upon her lips, and nodded pleasantly to Julien. In her slim stateliness, the untroubled serenity of youth reflected in her smiling face, she represented perfectly the other type of womanhood. Madame Christophor rose deliberately to her feet. For one swift moment she measured the things between them. She herself was conscious of a greater intellectual maturity, a more subtle quality in her looks, a beauty less describable, more exotic, perhaps, but also more provocative. The arts of her sex were at her finger-tips, the small arts disdained by this well-looking and perfectly healthy young woman. She turned her head quickly towards Sir Julien. It was the idle impulse of the man or woman who plucks the petals from a flower. Julien was gazing steadfastly at Lady Anne…. Madame Christophor picked up her belongings and moved towards the door.
"Be merciless today, my friend!" she exclaimed, pausing upon the threshold,—"virulent, if you will! Le Jour was screaming at you last night. Jesen has lost his head a little; or is it the lash of his master which he feels? How can one tell?"
"After tonight," Julien remarked, with a smile, "who will read Le
Jour? I shall tell the story of the purchase of that paper by Herr
Freudenberg. French people will not love to think that the pen of Jesen
has been guided by the hand of Germany."
Madame Christophor made a little grimace.