He stretched himself out in a comfortable attitude, and looked contentedly at his companion. The talk drifted into generalities. Minna whetted upon him her satiric knife, a process which he found himself to be enjoying. The Jew money-lender’s daughter, the rather common and silly little girl, whom he once despised, appeared to him in a totally new light. She had developed into a beautiful woman, with a cynical knowledge of the world and an alluring shamelessness of speech. Her manner was that of the insolently luxurious demi-mondaine; her great wealth transferred her to the sphere of the unassailed. In this dual, interfused light, she appeared a woman well worth the study of an idle afternoon. She was certainly a change from the fair frailties of South Africa. The puffs and frills and ribbons of the daring daffodil costume struck an elementary note of sex. He began to forget that she had mopped and mowed at him like an imbecile when they had last been face to face. She was a new acquaintance. He found himself losing the brusqueness of his earlier words, and dropping into the tone of deference her languid beauty seemed to command. When she arose, in the intention of going to meet Mrs. Delamere’s train, and held out her hand for farewell, he offered his escort to the railway station, with the air of a man begging for a favour. Minna was amused, somewhat interested; the originality of the situation gave a fillip to her mood. She assented graciously, and they proceeded through the casino grounds. They arrived at the station a minute or two before the train. Mrs. Delamere stepped out on to the platform. Minna with a strange man at her heels was by no means an unusual sight. But when Minna introduced him as her old friend, Mr. Merriam, she arched her eyebrows involuntarily, and glanced at the girl, in whose eyes gleamed a spark of mockery. “What has become of M. de Boissy?” she asked on their way to the casino. “Oh, Mr. Merriam told him to go and play,” laughed Minna. CHAPTER XXII An idle, average sensual man, and an idle woman from whom wantonness emanates like a perfume, cannot meet each other every day for a couple of weeks without finding themselves progressing by leaps and bounds in mutual intimacy. The flesh speaks, the world is complaisant, and the devil leers beatifically. The attraction which Gerard first felt towards the transfigured money-lender’s daughter developed quickly into a more vivid sentiment. Except that of an old club acquaintance whom he had run across in the gaming-rooms, he had no other society than Minna’s in Monte Carlo. She became his occupation. The circle of friends to whom she introduced him aroused his British contempt. He was as much out of touch with the overdressed cosmopolitan ladies as with the excessively polite cosmopolitan men. He treated them all civilly enough, with a certain uncomfortable indifference, when he met them in her company, but avoided them studiously when he was alone.