Page:The Plutocrat (1927).pdf/198

 and under the playwright's eye; for she came by, just then, in one of the gay, shabby little surreys, with Mlle. Daurel beside her and her son and Mlle. Lucie Daurel in another surrey behind them.

Mme. Momoro gravely and slightly inclined her head to the Tinker automobile, not as if in a personal greeting, but in the manner of a lady whose courtesy extends itself to acknowledge the presence of people recognizable as fellow-travellers. Then, to Ogle's chilled surprise, this same distant formality was visible the next moment in her return of his own salutation. Usually she greeted him with a brightening vivid recognition that seemed to say, "You, at last! How charming!" Mlle. Daurel, sitting beside her, austere, dryly pallid, and infinitely remote, had such a frigidity of look as he had never seen upon the frostiest of American women; she suggested the snow on a faraway mountain peak, never thawed and very old. And Mme. Momoro seemed to have caught from her a little of this icy remoteness and to have become again the wholly impassive statue she was upon his first sight of her in the smoking-room.

He went to brood upon this in a tea-room; then returned in a launch to the "Duumvir," where he found a sprightly show of embroidered Spanish shawls en-