Chapter 19 - Page 2

he
seated himself and turned his pleasant eyes on the scene: "Il n'y a pas
à dire, my dear Bowen, it's charming and sympathetic and original--we
owe America a debt of gratitude for inventing it!"

Bowen felt a last touch of satisfaction: they were the very words to
complete his thought.

"My dear fellow, it's really you and your kind who are responsible. It's
the direct creation of feudalism, like all the great social upheavals!"

Raymond de Chelles stroked his handsome brown moustache. "I should have
said, on the contrary, that one enjoyed it for the contrast. It's such
a refreshing change from our institutions--which are, nevertheless, the
necessary foundations of society. But just as one may have an infinite
admiration for one's wife, and yet occasionally--" he waved a light hand
toward the spectacle. "This, in the social order, is the diversion, the
permitted diversion, that your original race has devised: a kind of
superior Bohemia, where one may be respectable without being bored."

Bowen laughed. "You've put it in a nutshell: the ideal of the American
woman is to be respectable without being bored; and from that point of
view this world they've invented has more originality than I gave it
credit for."

Chelles thoughtfully unfolded his napkin. "My impression's a superficial
one, of course--for as to what goes on underneath--!" He looked across
the room. "If I married I shouldn't care to have my wife come here too
often."

Bowen laughed again. "She'd be as safe as in a bank! Nothing ever goes
on! Nothing that ever happens here is real."

"Ah, quant à cela--" the Frenchman murmured, inserting a fork into
his melon. Bowen looked at him with enjoyment--he was such a precious
foot-note to the page! The two men, accidentally thrown together some
years previously during a trip up the Nile, always met again with
pleasure when Bowen returned to France. Raymond de Chelles, who came of
a family of moderate fortune, lived for the greater part of the year on
his father's estates in Burgundy; but he came up every spring to the
entresol of the old Marquis's hotel for a two months' study of human
nature, applying to the pursuit the discriminating taste and transient
ardour that give the finest bloom to pleasure. Bowen liked him as a
companion and admired him as a charming specimen of the Frenchman of his
class, embodying in his lean, fatigued and finished person that happy
mean of simplicity and intelligence of which no other race has found the
secret. If Raymond de Chelles had been English he would have been a
mere fox-hunting animal, with appetites but without tastes; but in his