A French family loudly chattered and frankly stared in one corner; for the rest, all seemed to be compatriots.
But after Althea had taken her seat at her own table near the pleasantly open window, and had consulted the menu and ordered a half-bottle of white wine, another young woman entered and went to the last vacant table left in the room, the table next Althea's--so near, indeed, that the waiter found some difficulty in squeezing himself between them when he presented the _carte des vins_ to the newcomer.
She was not an American, Althea felt sure of this at once, and the mere negation was so emphatic that it almost constituted, for the first startled glance, a complete definition.

But, glancing again and again, while she ate her soup, Althea realised there were so many familiar things the newcomer was not, that she seemed made up of differences.

The fact that she was English--she spoke to the waiter absent-mindedly in that tongue--did not make her less different, for she was like no English person that Althea had ever seen.

She engaged at once the whole of her attention, but at first Althea could not have said whether this attention were admiring; her main impression was of oddity, of something curiously arresting and noticeable.
The newcomer sat in profile to Althea, her back to the room, facing the open window, out of which she gazed vaguely and unseeingly.

She was dressed in black, a thin dress, rather frayed along the edges--an evening dress; though, as a concession to Continental custom, she had a wide black scarf over her bare shoulders.