Jason | Page 8

each other's heads! She takes my breath away at times."
"Ah, well," said Ste. Marie, "perhaps we can settle upon something when I've led you to the place where food is. And, by-the-way, what are we waiting for? Are we not all here? There's an even number." He broke off with a sudden exclamation of pleasure; and when Miss Benham turned to look, she found that Baron de Vries, who had been talking to some friends, had once more come up to where she stood.
She watched the greeting between the two men, and its quiet affection impressed her very much. She knew Baron de Vries well, and she knew that it was not his habit to show or to feel a strong liking for young and idle men. This young man must be very worth while to have won the regard of that wise old Belgian. Just then Hartley, who had been barricaded behind a cordon of friends, came up to her in an abominable temper over his ill luck, and a few moments later the dinner procession was formed and they went in.
At table Miss Benham found herself between Ste. Marie and the same strange, fair youth who had afflicted her in the drawing-room. She looked upon him now with a sort of dismayed terror, but it developed that there was nothing to fear from the fair youth. He had no attention to waste upon social amenities. He fell upon his food with a wolfish passion extraordinary to see and also--alas!--to hear. Miss Benham turned from him to meet Ste. Marie's delighted eye.
"Tell him for me," begged that gentleman, "that soup should be seen--not heard."
But Miss Benham gave a little shiver of disgust. "I shall tell him nothing whatever," she said. "He's quite too dreadful, really! People shouldn't be exposed to that sort of thing. It's not only the noises. Plenty of very charming and estimable Germans, for example, make strange noises at table. But he behaves like a famished dog over a bone. I refuse to have anything to do with him. You must make up the loss to me, M. Ste. Marie. You must be as amusing as two people." She smiled across at him in her gravely questioning fashion. "I'm wondering," she said, "if I dare ask you a very personal question. I hesitate because I don't like people who presume too much upon a short acquaintance--and our acquaintance has been very, very short, hasn't it? even though we may have heard a great deal about each other beforehand. I wonder--"
"Oh, I should ask it if I were you!" said Ste. Marie, at once. "I'm an extremely good-natured person. And, besides, I quite naturally feel flattered at your taking interest enough to ask anything about me."
"Well," said she, "it's this: Why does everybody call you just 'Ste. Marie'? Most people are spoken of as Monsieur this or that--if there isn't a more august title; but they all call you Ste. Marie without any Monsieur. It seems rather odd."
Ste. Marie looked puzzled. "Why," he said, "I don't believe I know, just. I'd never thought of that. It's quite true, of course. They never do use a Monsieur or anything, do they? How cheeky of them! I wonder why it is? I'll ask Hartley."
He did ask Hartley later on, and Hartley didn't know, either. Miss Benham asked some other people, who were vague about it, and in the end she became convinced that it was an odd and quite inexplicable form of something like endearment. But nobody seemed to have formulated it to himself.
"The name is really 'De Ste. Marie,'" he went on, "and there's a title that I don't use, and a string of Christian names that one never employs. My people were B��arnais, and there's a heap of ruins on top of a hill in the Pyrenees where they lived. It used to be Ste. Marie de Mont-les-Roses, but afterward, after the Revolution, they called it Ste. Marie de Mont Perdu. My great-grandfather was killed there, but some old servants smuggled his little son away and saved him."
He seemed to Miss Benham to say that in exactly the right manner, not in the cheap and scoffing fashion which some young men affect in speaking of ancestral fortunes or misfortunes, nor with too much solemnity. And when she allowed a little silence to occur at the end, he did not go on with his family history, but turned at once to another subject. It pleased her curiously.
The fair youth at her other side continued to crouch over his food, making fierce and animal-like noises. He never spoke or seemed to wish to be spoken to, and Miss Benham found it easy to ignore him altogether. It occurred to her once or twice that Ste. Marie's other neighbor might