sociable. He thought of Marthe, and he thought of Floss, and without enthusiasm east the die in favor of the latter. The princess's friends were sometimes trying, but they provided food for thought. Floss kept open house for "interesting" people,—that is to say, people who were like the girls in Frances Marple's ditty, of whom one could dance and one could sing and one could play the violing. For Floss anything printed was literature; anything played was music; whatever interesting people fabricated was art,—and she adored art. If her guests were wicked, as well as interesting, no harm done, for Floss relished a faint odor of sin. If they were neither interesting nor wicked, but had clean faces and were acquainted with somebody, that sufficed. He envied Floss her easy enthusiasms.
When he arrived im the Avenue du Bois de Boulogne he found the usual Sunday afternoon crush. By twos and threes Floss's lost souls came straggling in and her salon was a babel of dialects including many bad versions of French and English,—rather a pleasant babel till it struck on that flat, vacant ledge of mind laid bare by the nervous fatigue of too much observing, when the babel became as meaningless and disagreeable as an equivalent volume of rattling kitchenware. In one such moment, when he was sitting on a puffy sofa between a bilious poet, who was allowing himself for a monetary consideration to be divorced in favor of a senator, and an aging actress who was urging the poet
