“Wasn’t it simply yesterday, on the Channel?” French suggested, the words buzzing a little in his own ears; and Mrs. Paul instantly remembered. “Of course! How stupid of me!” Her random sweetness grew more concentrated. “You were talking to a dark man with a beard—André Jolyesse, wasn’t it? I _told_ my husband it was Jolyesse. How awfully interesting that you should know him! Do sit down and let me give you some tea while you tell us all about him.” French, as he took the cup from her hand, remembered that, a few hours earlier, he had been wondering what he and she would first say to each other. It was dark when he walked away from the blazing front of the Nouveau Luxe. Mrs. Donald Paul had given him two generous hours, and had filled them with talk of her first husband; yet as French turned from the hotel he had the feeling that what he brought away with him had hardly added a grain to his previous knowledge of Horace Fingall. It was perhaps because he was still too blankly bewildered—or because he had not yet found the link between what had been and what was—that he had been able to sift only so infinitesimal a residue out of Mrs. Paul’s abundance. And his first duty, plainly, if he were ever to thread a way through the tangle, was to readjust himself and try to see things from a different point of view. His one definite impression was that Mrs. Paul was very much pleased that he should have come to Paris to see her, and acutely, though artlessly, aware of the importance of his mission. Artlessness, in fact, seemed her salient quality: there looked out of her great Sphinx-eyes a consciousness as cloudless as a child’s. But one thing he speedily discovered: she was keenly alive to her first husband’s greatness. On that point French saw that she needed no enlightenment. He was even surprised, sitting opposite to her in all the blatancy of hotel mirrors and gilding, to catch on her lips the echoes of so different a setting. But he gradually perceived that the words she used had no meaning for her save, as it were, a symbolic one: they were like the mysterious price-marks with which dealers label their treasures. She knew that her husband had been proud and isolated, that he had “painted only for himself” and had “simply despised popularity”; but she rejoiced that he was now at last receiving “the kind of recognition even _he_ would have cared for”; and when French, at this point, interposed, with an impulse of self-vindication: “I didn’t know that, as yet, much had been written about him that he would have liked,” she opened her fathomless eyes a little wider, and answered: “Oh, but the dealers are simply fighting for his things.”