Russian and English, until other visitors arrived and Paul withdrew.




CHAPTER V


THE BARON

Among the visitors whom Paul left behind him in the little drawing-room
in Brook Street was the Baron Claude de Chauxville, Baron of Chauxville
and Chauxville le Duc, in the Province of Seine-et-Marne, France,
attaché to the French Embassy to the Court of St. James; before men a
rising diplomatist, before God a scoundrel. This gentleman remained when
the other visitors had left, and Miss Maggie Delafield, seeing his
intention of prolonging a visit of which she had already had sufficient,
made an inadequate excuse and left the room.

Miss Delafield, being a healthy-minded young English person of that
simplicity which is no simplicity at all, but merely simple-heartedness,
had her own ideas of what a man should be, and M. de Chauxville had the
misfortune to fall short of those ideas. He was too epigrammatic for
her, and beneath the brilliancy of his epigram she felt at times the
presence of something dark and nauseous. Her mental attitude toward him
was contemptuous and perfectly polite. With the reputation of possessing
a dangerous fascination--one of those reputations which can only emanate
from the man himself--M. de Chauxville neither fascinated nor
intimidated Miss Delafield. He therefore disliked her intensely. His
vanity was colossal, and when a Frenchman is vain he is childishly so.