“Elle dit le mot, Anastase, né pour d’éternels parchemins.” He could not, however, get interested. Was it the obstinate Eighteenth Century animal vision? When you plunge into these beings, must they be all quivering with unconsciousness, like life with a cat or a serpent?—But her sex would throw clouds over her eyes. She was a woman. It was no good. Again he must confess Anastasya could only offer him something too _serious_. He could not _play_ with that. Sex-loyalty to his most habitual lips interfered. He had the protective instinct that people with a sense of their own power have for those not equals with whom they have been associated. He would have given to Bertha the authority of his own spirit, to prime her with himself that she might meet on equal terms and vanquish any rival. He experienced a slight hostility to Anastasya like a part of Bertha left in himself protesting and jealous. It was chiefly vanity at the thought of this superior woman’s contempt could she see his latest female effort. “I suppose she knows all about Bertha,” he thought. Kreisler-like, he looked towards the Lipmann women. “Homme sensuel! Homme égoïste!” She seemed rather shy with him. “How do you like Paris?” he asked her. “I don’t know yet. Do you like it?” She had a flatness in speaking English because of her education in the United States. “I don’t like to be quite so near the centre of the world. You can see all the machinery working. It makes you a natural sceptic. But here I am. I find it difficult to live in London.” “I should have thought everything was so perfected here that the machinery did not obtrude⸺” “I don’t feel that. I think that a place like this exists for the rest of the world. It works that the other countries may live and create. That is the rôle France has chosen. The French spirit seems to me rather spare and impoverished at present.” “You regard it as a mother-drudge?” “More of a drudge than a mother. We don’t get much really from France, except tidiness.” “I expect you are ungrateful.”