Phil had had a glimpse of an English home and now he was to have one of a home in France, an intimacy which seldom falls to the lot of the tourist. Smiling as she knew how, a hostess with the charm of French manner, Madame Ribot received him, taking in, without seeming to do so, every detail, from the state of his nails to the cut of his clothes. Her judgment of people was that of appearance and manner and position. There were Americans who were nice and who were not nice and Englishmen and Frenchmen who were nice and who were not nice. She would have preferred a nice villain to an ill-mannered saint. For she had decided when quite young that it was not worth while wasting one's time with anybody who was not nice. At the same time, she insisted that she was not a snob and the great appeal to her of the French was their democracy. What she really liked about the French was their politeness, their cooking, their novels and their art of living. She decided that Phil was one of the nice Americans, though she had foreseen that he must be or Henriette would not have wanted to invite him to Mervaux. Helen never invited anybody. When quite young she had failed to distinguish between the nice and the unnice people. The morning train from Paris to Mervaux had been taken off and the afternoon train was late. Henriette had met Phil at the station and Helen was away from the house when they arrived. After his glimpse of armed Europe rushing to conflict, after seeing and feeling the straining effort of the nations with every human being drawn into the maelstrom of one emotion, he had hardly conceived it possible that nature could have tucked away any three people in a spot so completely sequestered from the war. He would not have come to Mervaux if it had not been for Henriette. He had admitted as much to himself going down on the train. When a man has seen a girl for an afternoon and a morning and keeps rehearsing the incidents of their meeting on his first holiday in Europe, he may well look forward to seeing her again with a certain personal curiosity. Sometimes the second impression is convincing of a temporary squint in the eye at the time of the first. He had remarked on the way from Truckleford to London that he had been hit rather in the spirit of banter; but four weeks later he was in need of disillusioning. Though parenthetically it may be said that he did not put the situation to himself in such bold terms. The stroll through the grounds of the chateau in the hour before dinner should have brought the disillusioning process well into being. But if it had even started it was arrested when Henriette picked a rosebud and fastened it in his buttonhole, an old form of illusioning or of reinforcing an illusion which loses nothing of its charm if the young woman be beautiful and smiles up at you when the rose is in place. "We shall begin the portrait to-morrow, shan't we?" she asked, as they turned leisurely back toward the house.