'I know nothing of them.' Watson began to talk of other things.

But as he and Fenwick discussed the pictures on the easels, or Fenwick's own projects, as they talked of Manet, and Zola's 'L'Oeuvre,' and the Goncourts, as they compared the state of painting in London and Paris, employing all the latest phrases, both of them astonishingly well informed as to men and tendencies--Watson as an outsider, Fenwick as a passionate partisan, loathing the Impressionists, denouncing a show of Manet and Renoir recently opened at a Paris dealer's--Watson's inner mind was really full of Madame de Pastourelles, and that _salon_ of hers in the old Westminster house in Dean's Yard, of which during so many years Fenwick had made one of the principal figures.

It should perhaps be explained that some two years after Fenwick's arrival in London, Madame de Pastourelles had thought it best to establish a little _menage_ of her own, distinct from the household in St.James's Square.

Her friends and her stepmother's were not always congenial to each other; and in many ways both Lord Findon and she were the happier for the change.

Her small panelled rooms had quickly become the meeting-place of a remarkable and attractive society.