He wrote a cheque with a fountain-pen heavily chased with gold. Soames
watched the process uneasily. How on earth had the fellow known that he
wanted to sell that picture? Monsieur Profond held out the cheque.

"The English are awful funny about pictures," he said. "So are the
French, so are my people. They're all awful funny."

"I don't understand you," said Soames stiffly.

"It's like hats," said Monsieur Profond enigmatically, "small or large,
turnin' up or down--just the fashion. Awful funny." And, smiling, he
drifted out of the gallery again, blue and solid like the smoke of his
excellent cigar.

Soames had taken the cheque, feeling as if the intrinsic value of
ownership had been called in question. 'He's a cosmopolitan,' he
thought, watching Profond emerge from under the verandah with Annette,
and saunter down the lawn toward the river. What his wife saw in the
fellow he didn't know, unless it was that he could speak her language;
and there passed in Soames what Monsieur Profond would have called a
"small doubt" whether Annette was not too handsome to be walking with
any one so "cosmopolitan." Even at that distance he could see the blue
fumes from Profond's cigar wreath out in the quiet sunlight; and his
grey buckskin shoes, and his grey hat--the fellow was a dandy! And he
could see the quick turn of his wife's head, so very straight on her
desirable neck and shoulders. That turn of her neck always seemed to him
a little too showy, and in the "Queen of all I survey" manner--not quite
distinguished. He watched them walk along the path at the bottom of the
garden. A young man in flannels joined them down there--a Sunday caller