“We have watched your crossing,” said monsieur de Maubert, as the greetings passed, “in imagination. It has been a sea of glass. A sea for the Venus of Botticelli on her shell.—You rise before us in a guise even more welcome than that of the amiable goddess.” Monsieur de Maubert also was changed, though Giles had no time just then for more than a passing glance at the recognition. He spoke with a certain heaviness; as though he came forward to lend a hand. “A kind young Englishman in tweeds is, I can assure him, far more pleasing to me than any Venus ever painted by Botticelli,” smiled madame Vervier. “Giles has become a great philosopher, Maman,” said Alix. She untied her _baba_ at the table and placed it carefully on a plate in its little pasteboard dish. “He always was a great philosopher,” smiled madame Vervier. “He is the wisest young man, as well as the kindest, that I have ever known.” “Ah, but it is now a professional wisdom as well,” said Alix. Albertine, with a saturnine smile of welcome for Giles, brought out the tea and madame Vervier took her place at the table. Everything in her loveliness was altered and, as he looked at her, with surreptitious glances, aware, so strangely, that André was looking at him, Giles suddenly felt that it made him think of the alteration in Toppie’s face. She, like Toppie, had drunk tears night after night; she had seen the truth and been shattered by it; and she, like Toppie, was built up again. A drift of lilac went behind her head in his imagination while the link so marvellously bound them together. For had she, too, not relinquished? It was as Alix had said it would be. She had guessed everything. Yet, though so wan, so careful, so oppressed, she was serene. Her strength, her security, even, was still there, but disenchanted, turned to other uses. “I feel it so strange that English people should be philosophers,” she said. Giles saw that she intended them all to talk. “Do you think it too reasonable a pursuit for such an irrational people as we are?” he asked. “Yes. Just that. You are a people who improvise as you go. To philosophize would have been, I should imagine, against the genius of your race.” “Oh, we’re not all of us, all the time, lurching along on mere instinct. We do, some of us,” said Giles, “stop, now and then, and reflect.” “But lurching becomes you,” André at this put in. “You lurch, as a rule, in the right direction—for yourselves. Look at your Empire,” he smiled, taking a slice of _baba_, “all made up of lurches and success.” “We planned to have India, you will remember,” Alix, at this, suddenly remarked. “We planned and even plotted it. It was only as they worked as best they could against our plots that the English won it, not intending to have an Indian Empire at all.—I always like that. That always seems to me just. And history is so seldom just.”