Chapter 19

"The Parisian Diamond Company--Anglo-American branch."

Charles Bowen, seated, one rainy evening of the Paris season, in a
corner of the great Nouveau Luxe restaurant, was lazily trying to
resolve his impressions of the scene into the phrases of a letter to his
old friend Mrs. Henley Fairford.

The long habit of unwritten communion with this lady--in no way
conditioned by the short rare letters they actually exchanged--usually
caused his notations, in absence, to fall into such terms when the
subject was of a kind to strike an answering flash from her. And who
but Mrs. Fairford would see, from his own precise angle, the fantastic
improbability, the layers on layers of unsubstantialness, on which the
seemingly solid scene before him rested?

The dining-room of the Nouveau Luxe was at its fullest, and, having
contracted on the garden side through stress of weather, had even
overflowed to the farther end of the long hall beyond; so that Bowen,
from his corner, surveyed a seemingly endless perspective of plumed
and jewelled heads, of shoulders bare or black-coated, encircling the
close-packed tables. He had come half an hour before the time he had
named to his expected guest, so that he might have the undisturbed
amusement of watching the picture compose itself again before his eyes.
During some forty years' perpetual exercise of his perceptions he had
never come across anything that gave them the special titillation
produced by the sight of the dinner-hour at the Nouveau Luxe: the same
sense of putting his hand on human nature's passion for the factitious,
its incorrigible habit of imitating the imitation.

As he sat watching the familiar faces swept toward him on the rising
tide of arrival--for it was one of the joys of the scene that the type
was always the same even when the individual was not--he hailed with
renewed appreciation this costly expression of a social ideal. The
dining-room at the Nouveau Luxe represented, on such a spring evening,
what unbounded material power had devised for the delusion of its
leisure: a phantom "society," with all the rules, smirks, gestures of
its model, but evoked out of promiscuity and incoherence while the other
had been the product of continuity and choice. And the instinct which
had driven a new class of world-compellers to bind themselves to slavish
imitation of the superseded, and their prompt and reverent faith in
the reality of the sham they had created, seemed to Bowen the most
satisfying proof of human permanence.

With this thought in his mind he looked up to greet his guest. The Comte
Raymond de Chelles, straight, slim and gravely smiling, came toward him
with frequent pauses of salutation at the crowded tables; saying, as