An idle, average sensual man, and an idle woman from whom wantonness emanates like a perfume, cannot meet each other every day for a couple of weeks without finding themselves progressing by leaps and bounds in mutual intimacy. The flesh speaks, the world is complaisant, and the devil leers beatifically. The attraction which Gerard first felt towards the transfigured money-lender’s daughter developed quickly into a more vivid sentiment. Except that of an old club acquaintance whom he had run across in the gaming-rooms, he had no other society than Minna’s in Monte Carlo. She became his occupation. The circle of friends to whom she introduced him aroused his British contempt. He was as much out of touch with the overdressed cosmopolitan ladies as with the excessively polite cosmopolitan men. He treated them all civilly enough, with a certain uncomfortable indifference, when he met them in her company, but avoided them studiously when he was alone.

Minna held a reception every Tuesday night at the Casa Benedetta. At first, Mrs. Delamere had tried to put her in the way of knowing good people. She had worked and intrigued most sedulously, and had been successful in inducing a certain set to take up her charge. But seeing Minna play recklessly with all kinds of fire, they dropped her, out of regard for their own fingers. Minna called them Tartuffes and Pecksniffs, uttering scornful doubts as to the honour of the men and the chastity of the women, whereupon Mrs. Delamere shrugged her shoulders and began to experiment upon the next strata of society. These, by turns, refusing to support Minna, she had come upon the riff-raff. And the riff-raff of Monte Carlo is a very curious and heterogeneous formation. No one knows its past or its future. The men have perfect manners, the women perfect complexions. The ones are worth the others.

Minna’s receptions were brilliant enough. They were distinguished by animated conversation, excellent music, and irreproachable champagne. But to the stolid Philistine perception of Gerard Merriam there was an indefinable air of something wrong, such as strikes a guest at a perfectly well-conducted gathering at an expensive private lunatic asylum. When the ladies of the house were engaged with their guests, he lounged, hands in pockets, by the door leading on to the loggia, and surveyed the scene stonily. They were a damned lot, he murmured to himself; and added a couple of uncompromising Saxon vocables indicating the respective categories under which the men and women fell. Disrepute, as practised by foreigners, is a tawdry and contemptible thing in respectable though immoral British eyes.

Thus he stood one Tuesday evening some three weeks after his meeting with Minna. The room was brilliantly lighted. In a corner sat an eager crowd around a little roulette-table. On divans and easy chairs the remainder of the company laughed and chatted. Minna was the centre of a little group of men, two bald, scrupulously attired, wearing ribbons in their button-holes. One was telling a story. By the guffaws that followed, and by the way in which Minna held her fan before her face, Gerard guessed its nature. He glowered at her. As French was spoken, which he understood very badly, he felt an added sense of outrage.

A stout lady in mauve and rubies left the roulette and came over to Minna.

“Present to me your tame bear, my dear,” she said in a shrill falsetto. “He is sulking because no one is making him dance.”

Minna laughed, glanced at Gerard and met his lowering look. Then she bit her lip. It was ridiculous for a man to behave so foolishly. She rose; resigned her seat to the lady, and walked with her slow, languid step to Gerard.

“Madame Raborski is dying to make your acquaintance.”

“It would be a good thing to let her die,” said Gerard.

“Well, she will soon. Grant her this last favour.”

Annoyance screwed his features. “I can’t talk inanities to rouged women,” he said.

“You can talk them to me.”

“You’re not rouged. If you were, I shouldn’t.”

“I don’t think you ought to speak in this way of my friends,” she remarked.

“I suppose I am rude, and I beg your pardon. But they’re not your friends. They are a troupe of mountebanks whom you engage to entertain you. Come out on to the loggia.”

“And catch my death of cold? No, thank you.”

“You have scarcely spoken a word to me all the evening.”

“I speak to those who amuse me.”

“With blackguardly French stories.”

“That’s my affair.”

“I don’t like to see those fellows leering at you,” he said, sulkily.

To such a point of intimacy had three weeks’ intercourse brought them. Minna broke into the low notes of her laughter.

“Why shouldn’t they? It pleases them and doesn’t hurt me. And vice versa. Also, you know, I’m not a monopolisable woman. If you’ll go and talk nicely to Madame Raborski, I’ll let you give me some supper.”

“All right,” he said; “where is the siren?”

She conducted him to the group, performed the introduction. He bowed with the Englishman’s stiffness. The other men politely made place for him. He sat down and endured a quarter of an hour’s anguish. Minna joined the roulette-players, where Mrs. Delamere was staking on even chances, according to an infallible system in which one only plays every tenth or fifteenth game. It suited her purse and protracted the excitement. After winning a few hundred francs, Minna released Gerard from Madame Raborski, who had been trying to create an impression. But the supper-room was full; the hostess became the centre of flowery compliment, delivered with much uplifting of shoulders and spreading of thin bejewelled hands. Gerard chafed and felt his own great fingers tingle. He was not a man accustomed to the amenities of society. During his domesticated days, he went out with Irene only under compulsion. Women bored him, save those whom he appropriated to himself. Then he preferred seclusion with the chosen individual. Among these easy-mannered adventurers and satirical, sharp-witted women, he seemed as uncouth as a bear in a wilderness of monkeys. The comparison was Minna’s, in an after talk with Mrs. Delamere. Consciousness of his lack of adaptability did not soothe his temper. He felt annoyed with himself for coming. “Don’t look so glum,” whispered Minna. “Give me some of that pÂtÉ and look after the truffles.” He helped her solemnly, and brought the plate to the corner of the table where she was sitting. Then stood by her, at attention, while she jested with her neighbours. When she had finished, he escorted her to the salon, where she left him to join a handsome woman, in a very low dress, who was playing the piano. Mrs. Delamere, who had abandoned the roulette-table, took pity on him, and sat down with him on a divan against the wall. Being an Englishwoman of his own class, she could make herself companionable, and draw him on to his own subjects, the fortune he had made, the big game he had shot. She had known Freewintle, the mighty hunter with whom he had been associated, and gave satirical sketches of his family history. She was an authority on genealogies, a subject which, by one of the intellectual freaks not uncommon in men of Gerard’s type, interested him greatly. It is a curious fact, but a true one, that all genealogists are related to one another. Mrs. Delamere conclusively proved her connection with the Norfolk Merriams through the Freemantles. They were all East Anglians.

“You have done me good, Mr. Merriam,” she remarked. “I had almost forgotten that there was such a thing as a county family in existence. Look at these people here—I suppose they belong to somebody—but to whom?”

“If they had mothers, it’s about all,” replied Gerard, laughing. Mrs. Delamere had put him into a good humour. Soon afterwards he took his leave.

“Shall I see you to-morrow?” he asked Minna, while bidding her good-bye.

“Perhaps—I don’t know. If I go over to Monte Carlo you may meet me there. There are too many burdens in life to add to them voluntarily by making arrangements for the morrow.”

“You are looking tired,” he said. “A course of late hours and stuffy rooms becomes unhealthy if it’s overdone. Let me take you for a drive to-morrow.”

“With Mrs. Delamere?”

“No. You alone. I can get a decent turn-out in Nice, I suppose. I’ll call for you at two o’clock.”

“Where are you staying?”

“At the Grande Bretagne.”

“I’ll send you word in the morning. It depends how I feel.”

“I shall be wretchedly disappointed if you don’t come.”

“Will you?” she said with her lazy intonation. “Nous verrons.”

Later, when the guests had gone, Mrs. Delamere began to sound Gerard’s praises. He was a thorough Englishman, intelligent, masculine. Not like the effeminate creatures who had never seen a gun go off in their lives or ridden anything more spirited than a Turbie donkey. He was like a colossus amid these little men, she said, with a vague reminiscence of Shakespeare. It was then that Minna snapped out her bear and monkey comparison. She was thoroughly weary, lay back exhausted and spiritless in a chair, and regarded Gerard’s apologist with an air of tired resignation. The room was hot and stale with the breaths of many people, and the refuse of many perfumes.

“Bear or not,” replied Mrs. Delamere, drawing some crumpled and greasy bank notes from the pocket of her black silk dress, and delicately folding them, “I like to meet an honest, healthy English gentleman again. And I pity the man. I always pity men whose wives go wrong.”

“Pearls before swine,” said Minna, listlessly. “Oh, I am not so hard as that upon the women.”

“You mistake my meaning,” said Minna. “He is the hog.”

Mrs. Delamere looked up surprised. “I thought you disliked her so. And you certainly have been encouraging him.”

Minna drew her body together in a kind of shudder, and threw out her hand in a gesture of repulsion. “He gives me the creeps!” she said.

Mrs. Delamere did not reply. She rose and gathered her gloves and fan from a table where they were lying, and then came calmly up to Minna’s chair. “You are overdone. It is time for bed.”

She was not without kindly instincts. In her placid, well-bred way, she stooped and put her arm beneath Minna’s and helped her to rise. She stood for a moment without withdrawing her arm.

“You are leading a weary life, my poor child,” she said.

Minna looked at her for a minute. Her lips quivered.

“Oh! a hell of a life,” she whispered.

And to Mrs. Delamere’s consternation, the girl gave one or two little convulsive sobs and, turning swiftly, burst into miserable crying upon her shoulder.

“I wish I were dead. I can’t find peace or happiness anywhere. It is a hell of a life!”

The elder woman soothed her as best she could. Eventually Minna dried her eyes, kissed, for the first time, her friend’s faded cheek, and went out of the room.

“Why is it,” said Mrs. Delamere to herself, “that when a woman wants to go to the devil, she always does so by water?”

Gerard was up early the next morning, and after enquiries went in search of a respectable turn-out for the proposed drive. He found a high American phaeton and a pair of Irish ponies which the livery stable keeper had recently purchased from a dissipated young Englishman who, having ruined himself at the tables, had hurriedly hastened to England to enlist in a foot regiment. On returning towards the Public Gardens, he encountered his club acquaintance sitting outside the CafÉ de la Victoire. He joined him in an apÉritif, described his recent hire. The friend smiled indulgently.

“I suppose it’s for the Queen of Sheba.”

Gerard frowned surprise. “Who’s that?”

“The girl I’ve seen you with several times. They call her that, I suppose, because she’s wealthy, dusky, and indiscreet.”

“I used to know her in London long ago,” said Gerard, stiffly.

Suddenly the man remembered, flushed, and apologised.

“I’m awfully sorry. A thousand pardons. But one gets into a bad way of talking of public characters—and unfortunately every one talks of the lady by that name.”

Gerard sipped his vermouth coolly.

“What do you know about her?”

“Oh, nothing much. Really—I——”

“It would rather interest me to learn,” insisted Gerard.

“Well, she squanders a lot of money at the tables. And then she’s always attached to some new man or the other. Somewhat speckled, you see, in reputation. Introduction not necessary. That sort of thing. I don’t know if it’s true. I hope not.”

“Oh, I suppose it’s true,” said Gerard. “Women generally live a bit below their reputation.”

“I’m glad my indiscretion was not serious,” said his friend.

“Oh, dear, no,” laughed Gerard; and, turning the subject aside, “If you are doing nothing you might as well come and have some lunch with me at the Grande Bretagne.”

The friend assented. They strolled off together. At the hotel, the hall-porter gave Gerard a note which had just arrived. It was a line from Minna promising to be ready for the drive. He felt by no means displeased by his friend’s gossip; if anything, rather more settled in his mind. A beautiful and courted woman with several thousands a year commanded deference. The Queen of Sheba, of Monte Carlo scandal, on the other hand, was fair game. And the ease of the chase appealed to a man who was too masculine in his tastes to have cultivated the delicate gallantries of philandering. He crushed the note roughly into his pocket.

“A put off?” queried his friend.

“I guess not,” replied Gerard fatuously.