But to return to the evening of her arrival. In our salle-à-manger there was a rigid division of the sexes. The men sat on one side of the long table, the women on the other, with ‘Madame and her abbé cheek by jowl at the head. It was the only arrangement Madame had been able to effect, whereby to maintain amongst us something resembling order. Mademoiselle Miss had a seat assigned to her between Zélie and Yvonne, nearly opposite Chalks and myself; and she entered without embarrassment into conversation with all four of us. That is to say, she responded as well as she could in her broken classic French, and with perfect amiability, to such remarks as we directed at her. Save in addressing Madame or the abbé, nobody ever thought of saying vous at our unceremonious board; and Miss showed neither displeasure nor surprise when we included her in the prevailing tu. She had a quiet, sweet, English voice; an extremely delicate complexion, pale rose merging into lily-white (which we, I dare say, assumed was due to a scientific management of rouge and powder); a pair of large gray eyes; a lot of waving warm-brown hair; and a face so smooth of contour, so soft and fine in texture, that one might have thought her a mere girl of eighteen,—or twenty at the utmost,—whereas, in point of fact, as we learned later on, she was twenty-three.
On this first evening of her arrival, however, neophyte though she was, we observed her with no special care, paid her no special attention, nor felt any special curiosity regarding her. Ladies of the quality we tacitly ascribed to her were such an old, old story for us; familiarity had bred apathy; we took her for granted very much as we might have taken for granted an addition to the number of chairs in the room. Besides, an attitude of nil-admirari towards all things, and particularly towards all things new, is the fashion of the Quarter; an attitude of torpid omniscience, of world-weary sophistication. We have seen everything, dissected everything, satisfied ourselves that stuffed with sawdust. We are fin-de-siecle, we are décadents, and we are Anglomaniacs to a man. To evince surprise at anything, therefore, or more than a supremely languid interest in anything, is what, when we are on our guard, most of us would die rather than do. Hence the questions that we put to Miss were few, desultory, superficial, and served in no wise to correct our misappreciation of her; whilst, together with the affirmative propositions that we laid down, they pre-supposed a point of view and a past experience similar to our own.