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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Madame de Mauves, by Henry James
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Madame de Mauves
+
+Author: Henry James
+
+Release Date: April, 2005 [EBook #7813]
+Posting Date: July 27, 2009
+Last Updated: September 18, 2016
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MADAME DE MAUVES ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Eve Sobol
+
+
+
+
+
+MADAME DE MAUVES
+
+
+Byhenry James
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+The view from the terrace at Saint-Germain-en-Laye is immense and
+famous. Paris lies spread before you in dusky vastness, domed and
+fortified, glittering here and there through her light vapours and
+girdled with her silver Seine. Behind you is a park of stately symmetry,
+and behind that a forest where you may lounge through turfy avenues and
+light-chequered glades and quite forget that you are within half an
+hour of the boulevards. One afternoon, however, in mid-spring, some five
+years ago, a young man seated on the terrace had preferred to keep this
+in mind. His eyes were fixed in idle wistfulness on the mighty human
+hive before him. He was fond of rural things, and he had come to
+Saint-Germain a week before to meet the spring halfway; but though he
+could boast of a six months’ acquaintance with the great city he never
+looked at it from his present vantage without a sense of curiosity still
+unappeased. There were moments when it seemed to him that not to be
+there just then was to miss some thrilling chapter of experience. And
+yet his winter’s experience had been rather fruitless and he had closed
+the book almost with a yawn. Though not in the least a cynic he was what
+one may call a disappointed observer, and he never chose the right-hand
+road without beginning to suspect after an hour’s wayfaring that the
+left would have been the better. He now had a dozen minds to go to Paris
+for the evening, to dine at the Cafe Brebant and repair afterwards to
+the Gymnase and listen to the latest exposition of the duties of the
+injured husband. He would probably have risen to execute this project if
+he had not noticed a little girl who, wandering along the terrace,
+had suddenly stopped short and begun to gaze at him with round-eyed
+frankness. For a moment he was simply amused, the child’s face denoting
+such helpless wonderment; the next he was agreeably surprised. “Why this
+is my friend Maggie,” he said; “I see you’ve not forgotten me.”
+
+Maggie, after a short parley, was induced to seal her remembrance with
+a kiss. Invited then to explain her appearance at Saint-Germain, she
+embarked on a recital in which the general, according to the infantine
+method, was so fatally sacrificed to the particular that Longmore looked
+about him for a superior source of information. He found it in Maggie’s
+mamma, who was seated with another lady at the opposite end of the
+terrace; so, taking the child by the hand, he led her back to her
+companions.
+
+Maggie’s mamma was a young American lady, as you would immediately have
+perceived, with a pretty and friendly face and a great elegance of fresh
+finery. She greeted Longmore with amazement and joy, mentioning his name
+to her friend and bidding him bring a chair and sit with them. The other
+lady, in whom, though she was equally young and perhaps even prettier,
+muslins and laces and feathers were less of a feature, remained silent,
+stroking the hair of the little girl, whom she had drawn against her
+knee. She had never heard of Longmore, but she now took in that her
+companion had crossed the ocean with him, had met him afterwards in
+travelling and--having left her husband in Wall Street--was indebted
+to him for sundry services. Maggie’s mamma turned from time to time and
+smiled at this lady with an air of invitation; the latter smiled back
+and continued gracefully to say nothing. For ten minutes, meanwhile,
+Longmore felt a revival of interest in his old acquaintance; then (as
+mild riddles are more amusing than mere commonplaces) it gave way to
+curiosity about her friend. His eyes wandered; her volubility shook a
+sort of sweetness out of the friend’s silence.
+
+The stranger was perhaps not obviously a beauty nor obviously an
+American, but essentially both for the really seeing eye. She was slight
+and fair and, though naturally pale, was delicately flushed just now,
+as by the effect of late agitation. What chiefly struck Longmore in her
+face was the union of a pair of beautifully gentle, almost languid grey
+eyes with a mouth that was all expression and intention. Her forehead
+was a trifle more expansive than belongs to classic types, and her thick
+brown hair dressed out of the fashion, just then even more ugly than
+usual. Her throat and bust were slender, but all the more in harmony
+with certain rapid charming movements of the head, which she had a
+way of throwing back every now and then with an air of attention and a
+sidelong glance from her dove-like eyes. She seemed at once alert
+and indifferent, contemplative and restless, and Longmore very soon
+discovered that if she was not a brilliant beauty she was at least a
+most attaching one. This very impression made him magnanimous. He was
+certain he had interrupted a confidential conversation, and judged it
+discreet to withdraw, having first learned from Maggie’s mamma--Mrs.
+Draper--that she was to take the six o’clock train back to Paris. He
+promised to meet her at the station.
+
+He kept his appointment, and Mrs. Draper arrived betimes, accompanied
+by her friend. The latter, however, made her farewells at the door and
+drove away again, giving Longmore time only to raise his hat. “Who
+is she?” he asked with visible ardour as he brought the traveller her
+tickets.
+
+“Come and see me to-morrow at the Hotel de l’Empire,” she answered,
+“and I’ll tell you all about her.” The force of this offer in making
+him punctual at the Hotel de l’Empire Longmore doubtless never exactly
+measured; and it was perhaps well he was vague, for he found his friend,
+who was on the point of leaving Paris, so distracted by procrastinating
+milliners and perjured lingeres that coherence had quite deserted her.
+“You must find Saint-Germain dreadfully dull,” she nevertheless had the
+presence of mind to say as he was going. “Why won’t you come with me to
+London?”
+
+“Introduce me to Madame de Mauves,” he answered, “and Saint-Germain will
+quite satisfy me.” All he had learned was the lady’s name and residence.
+
+“Ah she, poor woman, won’t make your affair a carnival. She’s very
+unhappy,” said Mrs. Draper.
+
+Longmore’s further enquiries were arrested by the arrival of a young
+lady with a bandbox; but he went away with the promise of a note of
+introduction, to be immediately dispatched to him at Saint-Germain.
+
+He then waited a week, but the note never came, and he felt how little
+it was for Mrs. Draper to complain of engagements unperformed. He
+lounged on the terrace and walked in the forest, studied suburban street
+life and made a languid attempt to investigate the records of the court
+of the exiled Stuarts; but he spent most of his time in wondering where
+Madame de Mauves lived and whether she ever walked on the terrace.
+Sometimes, he was at last able to recognise; for one afternoon toward
+dusk he made her out from a distance, arrested there alone and leaning
+against the low wall. In his momentary hesitation to approach her there
+was almost a shade of trepidation, but his curiosity was not chilled by
+such a measure of the effect of a quarter of an hour’s acquaintance. She
+at once recovered their connexion, on his drawing near, and showed
+it with the frankness of a person unprovided with a great choice of
+contacts. Her dress, her expression, were the same as before; her charm
+came out like that of fine music on a second hearing. She soon made
+conversation easy by asking him for news of Mrs. Draper. Longmore told
+her that he was daily expecting news and after a pause mentioned the
+promised note of introduction.
+
+“It seems less necessary now,” he said--“for me at least. But for you--I
+should have liked you to know the good things our friend would probably
+have been able to say about me.”
+
+“If it arrives at last,” she answered, “you must come and see me and
+bring it. If it doesn’t you must come without it.”
+
+Then, as she continued to linger through the thickening twilight, she
+explained that she was waiting for her husband, who was to arrive in the
+train from Paris and who often passed along the terrace on his way home.
+Longmore well remembered that Mrs. Draper had spoken of uneasy things
+in her life, and he found it natural to guess that this same husband was
+the source of them. Edified by his six months in Paris, “What else is
+possible,” he put it, “for a sweet American girl who marries an unholy
+foreigner?”
+
+But this quiet dependence on her lord’s return rather shook his
+shrewdness, and it received a further check from the free confidence
+with which she turned to greet an approaching figure. Longmore
+distinguished in the fading light a stoutish gentleman, on the fair side
+of forty, in a high grey hat, whose countenance, obscure as yet against
+the quarter from which it came, mainly presented to view the large
+outward twist of its moustache. M. de Mauves saluted his wife with
+punctilious gallantry and, having bowed to Longmore, asked her several
+questions in French. Before taking his offered arm to walk to their
+carriage, which was in waiting at the gate of the terrace, she
+introduced our hero as a friend of Mrs. Draper and also a fellow
+countryman, whom she hoped they might have the pleasure of seeing, as
+she said, chez eux. M. de Mauves responded briefly, but civilly, in fair
+English, and led his wife away.
+
+Longmore watched him as he went, renewing the curl of his main facial
+feature--watched him with an irritation devoid of any mentionable
+ground. His one pretext for gnashing his teeth would have been in his
+apprehension that this gentleman’s worst English might prove a matter to
+shame his own best French. For reasons involved apparently in the very
+structure of his being Longmore found a colloquial use of that idiom
+as insecure as the back of a restive horse, and was obliged to take his
+exercise, as he was aware, with more tension than grace. He reflected
+meanwhile with comfort that Madame de Mauves and he had a common tongue,
+and his anxiety yielded to his relief at finding on his table that
+evening a letter from Mrs. Draper. It enclosed a short formal missive to
+Madame de Mauves, but the epistle itself was copious and confidential.
+She had deferred writing till she reached London, where for a week, of
+course, she had found other amusements.
+
+“I think it’s the sight of so many women here who don’t look at all like
+her that has reminded me by the law of contraries of my charming friend
+at Saint-Germain and my promise to introduce you to her,” she wrote.
+“I believe I spoke to you of her rather blighted state, and I wondered
+afterwards whether I hadn’t been guilty of a breach of confidence. But
+you would certainly have arrived at guesses of your own, and, besides,
+she has never told me her secrets. The only one she ever pretended to
+was that she’s the happiest creature in the world, after assuring me
+of which, poor thing, she went off into tears; so that I prayed to be
+delivered from such happiness. It’s the miserable story of an American
+girl born neither to submit basely nor to rebel crookedly marrying a
+shining sinful Frenchman who believes a woman must do one or the other
+of those things. The lightest of US have a ballast that they can’t
+imagine, and the poorest a moral imagination that they don’t require.
+She was romantic and perverse--she thought the world she had been
+brought up in too vulgar or at least too prosaic. To have a decent
+home-life isn’t perhaps the greatest of adventures; but I think she
+wishes nowadays she hadn’t gone in quite so desperately for thrills. M.
+de Mauves cared of course for nothing but her money, which he’s spending
+royally on his menus plaisirs. I hope you appreciate the compliment
+I pay you when I recommend you to go and cheer up a lady domestically
+dejected. Believe me, I’ve given no other man a proof of this esteem; so
+if you were to take me in an inferior sense I would never speak to you
+again. Prove to this fine sore creature that our manners may have all
+the grace without wanting to make such selfish terms for it. She avoids
+society and lives quite alone, seeing no one but a horrible French
+sister-in-law. Do let me hear that you’ve made her patience a little
+less absent-minded. Make her WANT to forget; make her like you.”
+
+This ingenious appeal left the young man uneasy. He found himself in
+presence of more complications than had been in his reckoning. To call
+on Madame de Mauves with his present knowledge struck him as akin to
+fishing in troubled waters. He was of modest composition, and yet he
+asked himself whether an appearance of attentions from any gallant
+gentleman mightn’t give another twist to her tangle. A flattering sense
+of unwonted opportunity, however--of such a possible value constituted
+for him as he had never before been invited to rise to--made him with
+the lapse of time more confident, possibly more reckless. It was too
+inspiring not to act upon the idea of kindling a truer light in his fair
+countrywoman’s slow smile, and at least he hoped to persuade her that
+even a raw representative of the social order she had not done justice
+to was not necessarily a mere fortuitous collocation of atoms. He
+immediately called on her.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+She had been placed for her education, fourteen years before, in a
+Parisian convent, by a widowed mammma who was fonder of Homburg and
+Nice than of letting out tucks in the frocks of a vigorously growing
+daughter. Here, besides various elegant accomplishments--the art of
+wearing a train, of composing a bouquet, of presenting a cup of tea--she
+acquired a certain turn of the imagination which might have passed for
+a sign of precocious worldliness. She dreamed of marrying a man of
+hierarchical “rank”--not for the pleasure of hearing herself called
+Madame la Vicomtesse, for which it seemed to her she should never
+greatly care, but because she had a romantic belief that the enjoyment
+of inherited and transmitted consideration, consideration attached to
+the fact of birth, would be the direct guarantee of an ideal delicacy
+of feeling. She supposed it would be found that the state of being noble
+does actually enforce the famous obligation. Romances are rarely worked
+out in such transcendent good faith, and Euphemia’s excuse was the prime
+purity of her moral vision. She was essentially incorruptible, and she
+took this pernicious conceit to her bosom very much as if it had been a
+dogma revealed by a white-winged angel. Even after experience had given
+her a hundred rude hints she found it easier to believe in fables,
+when they had a certain nobleness of meaning, than in well-attested but
+sordid facts. She believed that a gentleman with a long pedigree must
+be of necessity a very fine fellow, and enjoyment of a chance to
+carry further a family chronicle begun ever so far back must be, as
+a consciousness, a source of the most beautiful impulses. It wasn’t
+therefore only that noblesse oblige, she thought, as regards yourself,
+but that it ensures as nothing else does in respect to your wife. She
+had never, at the start, spoken to a nobleman in her life, and these
+convictions were but a matter of extravagant theory. They were the
+fruit, in part, of the perusal of various Ultramontane works of
+fiction--the only ones admitted to the convent library--in which the
+hero was always a Legitimist vicomte who fought duels by the dozen but
+went twice a month to confession; and in part of the strong social scent
+of the gossip of her companions, many of them filles de haut lieu who,
+in the convent-garden, after Sundays at home, depicted their brothers
+and cousins as Prince Charmings and young Paladins. Euphemia listened
+and said nothing; she shrouded her visions of matrimony under a coronet
+in the silence that mostly surrounds all ecstatic faith. She was not
+of that type of young lady who is easily induced to declare that her
+husband must be six feet high and a little near-sighted, part his hair
+in the middle and have amber lights in his beard. To her companions her
+flights of fancy seemed short, rather, and poor and untutored; and
+even the fact that she was a sprig of the transatlantic democracy never
+sufficiently explained her apathy on social questions. She had a mental
+image of that son of the Crusaders who was to suffer her to adore him,
+but like many an artist who has produced a masterpiece of idealisation
+she shrank from exposing it to public criticism. It was the portrait of
+a gentleman rather ugly than handsome and rather poor than rich. But his
+ugliness was to be nobly expressive and his poverty delicately proud.
+She had a fortune of her own which, at the proper time, after fixing on
+her in eloquent silence those fine eyes that were to soften the feudal
+severity of his visage, he was to accept with a world of stifled
+protestations. One condition alone she was to make--that he should have
+“race” in a state as documented as it was possible to have it. On this
+she would stake her happiness; and it was so to happen that several
+accidents conspired to give convincing colour to this artless
+philosophy.
+
+Inclined to long pauses and slow approaches herself, Euphemia was
+a great sitter at the feet of breathless volubility, and there were
+moments when she fairly hung upon the lips of Mademoiselle Marie de
+Mauves. Her intimacy with this chosen schoolmate was founded on the
+perception--all her own--that their differences were just the right
+ones. Mademoiselle de Mauves was very positive, very shrewd,
+very ironical, very French--everything that Euphemia felt herself
+unpardonable for not being. During her Sundays en ville she had examined
+the world and judged it, and she imparted her impressions to our
+attentive heroine with an agreeable mixture of enthusiasm and
+scepticism. She was moreover a handsome and well-grown person, on whom
+Euphemia’s ribbons and trinkets had a trick of looking better than on
+their slender proprietress. She had finally the supreme merit of being
+a rigorous example of the virtue of exalted birth, having, as she did,
+ancestors honourably mentioned by Joinville and Commines, and a stately
+grandmother with a hooked nose who came up with her after the holidays
+from a veritable castel in Auvergne. It seemed to our own young woman
+that these attributes made her friend more at home in the world than if
+she had been the daughter of even the most prosperous grocer. A certain
+aristocratic impudence Mademoiselle de Mauves abundantly possessed,
+and her raids among her friend’s finery were quite in the spirit of her
+baronial ancestors in the twelfth century--a spirit regarded by
+Euphemia but as a large way of understanding friendship, a freedom from
+conformities without style, and one that would sooner or later express
+itself in acts of surprising magnanimity. There doubtless prevailed
+in the breast of Mademoiselle de Mauves herself a dimmer vision of the
+large securities that Euphemia envied her. She was to become later in
+life so accomplished a schemer that her sense of having further heights
+to scale might well have waked up early. The especially fine appearance
+made by our heroine’s ribbons and trinkets as her friend wore them
+ministered to pleasure on both sides, and the spell was not of a nature
+to be menaced by the young American’s general gentleness. The concluding
+motive of Marie’s writing to her grandmamma to invite Euphemia for a
+three weeks’ holiday to the castel in Auvergne involved, however, the
+subtlest considerations. Mademoiselle de Mauves indeed, at this time
+seventeen years of age and capable of views as wide as her wants, was as
+proper a figure as could possibly have been found for the foreground
+of a scene artfully designed; and Euphemia, whose years were of like
+number, asked herself if a right harmony with such a place mightn’t
+come by humble prayer. It is a proof of the sincerity of the latter’s
+aspirations that the castel was not a shock to her faith. It was neither
+a cheerful nor a luxurious abode, but it was as full of wonders as a
+box of old heirlooms or objects “willed.” It had battered towers and
+an empty moat, a rusty drawbridge and a court paved with crooked
+grass-grown slabs over which the antique coach-wheels of the lady with
+the hooked nose seemed to awaken the echoes of the seventeenth century.
+Euphemia was not frightened out of her dream; she had the pleasure of
+seeing all the easier passages translated into truth, as the learner
+of a language begins with the common words. She had a taste for old
+servants, old anecdotes, old furniture, faded household colours and
+sweetly stale odours--musty treasures in which the Chateau de Mauves
+abounded. She made a dozen sketches in water-colours after her
+conventual pattern; but sentimentally, as one may say, she was for ever
+sketching with a freer hand.
+
+Old Madame de Mauves had nothing severe but her nose, and she seemed to
+Euphemia--what indeed she had every claim to pass for--the very image
+and pattern of an “historical character.” Belonging to a great order of
+things, she patronised the young stranger who was ready to sit all day
+at her feet and listen to anecdotes of the bon temps and quotations from
+the family chronicles. Madame de Mauves was a very honest old woman; she
+uttered her thoughts with ancient plainness. One day after pushing back
+Euphemia’s shining locks and blinking with some tenderness from behind
+an immense face-a-main that acted as for the relegation of the girl
+herself to the glass case of a museum, she declared with an energetic
+shake of the head that she didn’t know what to make of such a little
+person. And in answer to the little person’s evident wonder, “I should
+like to advise you,” she said, “but you seem to me so all of a piece
+that I’m afraid that if I advise you I shall spoil you. It’s easy to see
+you’re not one of us. I don’t know whether you’re better, but you
+seem to me to have been wound up by some key that isn’t kept by your
+governess or your confessor or even your mother, but that you wear by
+a fine black ribbon round your own neck. Little persons in my day--when
+they were stupid they were very docile, but when they were clever they
+were very sly! You’re clever enough, I imagine, and yet if I guessed all
+your secrets at this moment is there one I should have to frown at? I
+can tell you a wickeder one than any you’ve discovered for yourself. If
+you wish to live at ease in the doux pays de France don’t trouble too
+much about the key of your conscience or even about your conscience
+itself--I mean your own particular one. You’ll fancy it saying things it
+won’t help your case to hear. They’ll make you sad, and when you’re sad
+you’ll grow plain, and when you’re plain you’ll grow bitter, and when
+you’re bitter you’ll be peu aimable. I was brought up to think that a
+woman’s first duty is to be infinitely so, and the happiest women I’ve
+known have been in fact those who performed this duty faithfully. As
+you’re not a Catholic I suppose you can’t be a devote; and if you don’t
+take life as a fifty years’ mass the only way to take it’s as a game of
+skill. Listen to this. Not to lose at the game of life you must--I don’t
+say cheat, but not be too sure your neighbour won’t, and not be shocked
+out of your self-possession if he does. Don’t lose, my dear--I beseech
+you don’t lose. Be neither suspicious nor credulous, and if you find
+your neighbour peeping don’t cry out; only very politely wait your own
+chance. I’ve had my revenge more than once in my day, but I really think
+the sweetest I could take, en somme, against the past I’ve known, would
+be to have your blest innocence profit by my experience.”
+
+This was rather bewildering advice, but Euphemia understood it too
+little to be either edified or frightened. She sat listening to it very
+much as she would have listened to the speeches of an old lady in a
+comedy whose diction should strikingly correspond to the form of her
+high-backed armchair and the fashion of her coif. Her indifference was
+doubly dangerous, for Madame de Mauves spoke at the instance of coming
+events, and her words were the result of a worry of scruples--scruples
+in the light of which Euphemia was on the one hand too tender a victim
+to be sacrificed to an ambition and the prosperity of her own house on
+the other too precious a heritage to be sacrificed to an hesitation. The
+prosperity in question had suffered repeated and grievous breaches and
+the menaced institution been overmuch pervaded by that cold comfort in
+which people are obliged to balance dinner-table allusions to feudal
+ancestors against the absence of side-dishes; a state of things the
+sorrier as the family was now mainly represented by a gentleman whose
+appetite was large and who justly maintained that its historic glories
+hadn’t been established by underfed heroes.
+
+Three days after Euphemia’s arrival Richard de Mauves, coming down from
+Paris to pay his respects to his grandmother, treated our heroine to her
+first encounter with a gentilhomme in the flesh. On appearing he kissed
+his grandmother’s hand with a smile which caused her to draw it away
+with dignity, and set Euphemia, who was standing by, to ask herself
+what could have happened between them. Her unanswered wonder was but the
+beginning of a long chain of puzzlements, but the reader is free to know
+that the smile of M. de Mauves was a reply to a postscript affixed by
+the old lady to a letter addressed to him by her granddaughter as
+soon as the girl had been admitted to justify the latter’s promises.
+Mademoiselle de Mauves brought her letter to her grandmother for
+approval, but obtained no more than was expressed in a frigid nod. The
+old lady watched her with this coldness while she proceeded to seal the
+letter, then suddenly bade her open it again and bring her a pen.
+
+“Your sister’s flatteries are all nonsense,” she wrote; “the young
+lady’s far too good for you, mauvais sujet beyond redemption. If you’ve
+a particle of conscience you’ll not come and disturb the repose of an
+angel of innocence.”
+
+The other relative of the subject of this warning, who had read these
+lines, made up a little face as she freshly indited the address; but she
+laid down her pen with a confident nod which might have denoted that by
+her judgement her brother was appealed to on the ground of a principle
+that didn’t exist in him. And “if you meant what you said,” the young
+man on his side observed to his grandmother on his first private
+opportunity, “it would have been simpler not to have sent the letter.”
+
+Put out of humour perhaps by this gross impugnment of her sincerity, the
+head of the family kept her room on pretexts during a greater part of
+Euphemia’s stay, so that the latter’s angelic innocence was left all to
+her grandson’s mercy. It suffered no worse mischance, however, than to
+be prompted to intenser communion with itself. Richard de Mauves was the
+hero of the young girl’s romance made real, and so completely accordant
+with this creature of her imagination that she felt afraid of him almost
+as she would have been of a figure in a framed picture who should have
+stepped down from the wall. He was now thirty-three--young enough to
+suggest possibilities of ardent activity and old enough to have formed
+opinions that a simple woman might deem it an intellectual privilege to
+listen to. He was perhaps a trifle handsomer than Euphemia’s rather grim
+Quixotic ideal, but a very few days reconciled her to his good looks as
+effectually they would have reconciled her to a characterised want of
+them. He was quiet, grave, eminently distinguished. He spoke little,
+but his remarks, without being sententious, had a nobleness of tone that
+caused them to re-echo in the young girl’s ears at the end of the day.
+He paid her very little direct attention, but his chance words--when he
+only asked her if she objected to his cigarette--were accompanied by a
+smile of extraordinary kindness.
+
+It happened that shortly after his arrival, riding an unruly horse which
+Euphemia had with shy admiration watched him mount in the castle-yard,
+he was thrown with a violence which, without disparaging his skill, made
+him for a fortnight an interesting invalid lounging in the library
+with a bandaged knee. To beguile his confinement the accomplished young
+stranger was repeatedly induced to sing for him, which she did with a
+small natural tremor that might have passed for the finish of vocal
+art. He never overwhelmed her with compliments, but he listened with
+unfailing attention, remembered all her melodies and would sit humming
+them to himself. While his imprisonment lasted indeed he passed hours in
+her company, making her feel not unlike some unfriended artist who has
+suddenly gained the opportunity to devote a fortnight to the study of a
+great model. Euphemia studied with noiseless diligence what she supposed
+to be the “character” of M. de Mauves, and the more she looked the
+more fine lights and shades she seemed to behold in this masterpiece of
+nature. M. de Mauves’s character indeed, whether from a sense of being
+so generously and intensely taken for granted, or for reasons which bid
+graceful defiance to analysis, had never been so much on show, even to
+the very casual critic lodged, as might be said, in an out-of-the-way
+corner of it; it seemed really to reflect the purity of Euphemia’s pious
+opinion. There had been nothing especially to admire in the state of
+mind in which he left Paris--a settled resolve to marry a young person
+whose charms might or might not justify his sister’s account of them,
+but who was mistress, at the worst, of a couple of hundred thousand
+francs a year. He had not counted out sentiment--if she pleased him so
+much the better; but he had left a meagre margin for it and would hardly
+have admitted that so excellent a match could be improved by it. He was
+a robust and serene sceptic, and it was a singular fate for a man who
+believed in nothing to be so tenderly believed in. What his original
+faith had been he could hardly have told you, for as he came back to his
+childhood’s home to mend his fortunes by pretending to fall in love he
+was a thoroughly perverse creature and overlaid with more corruptions
+than a summer day’s questioning of his conscience would have put to
+flight. Ten years’ pursuit of pleasure, which a bureau full of unpaid
+bills was all he had to show for, had pretty well stifled the natural
+lad whose violent will and generous temper might have been shaped by
+a different pressure to some such showing as would have justified a
+romantic faith. So should he have exhaled the natural fragrance of a
+late-blooming flower of hereditary honour. His violence indeed had been
+subdued and he had learned to be irreproachably polite; but he had lost
+the fineness of his generosity, and his politeness, which in the long
+run society paid for, was hardly more than a form of luxurious egotism,
+like his fondness for ciphered pocket-handkerchiefs, lavender gloves
+and other fopperies by which shopkeepers remained out of pocket. In
+after-years he was terribly polite to his wife. He had formed himself,
+as the phrase was, and the form prescribed to him by the society into
+which his birth and his tastes had introduced him was marked by some
+peculiar features. That which mainly concerns us is its classification
+of the fairer half of humanity as objects not essentially different--say
+from those very lavender gloves that are soiled in an evening and
+thrown away. To do M. de Mauves justice, he had in the course of time
+encountered in the feminine character such plentiful evidence of its
+pliant softness and fine adjustability that idealism naturally seemed to
+him a losing game.
+
+Euphemia, as he lay on his sofa, struck him as by no means
+contradictory; she simply reminded him that very young women are
+generally innocent and that this is on the whole the most potent source
+of their attraction. Her innocence moved him to perfect consideration,
+and it seemed to him that if he shortly became her husband it would
+be exposed to a danger the less. Old Madame de Mauves, who flattered
+herself that in this whole matter she was very laudably rigid, might
+almost have taken a lesson from the delicacy he practised. For two or
+three weeks her grandson was well-nigh a blushing boy again. He watched
+from behind the Figaro, he admired and desired and held his tongue. He
+found himself not in the least moved to a flirtation; he had no wish
+to trouble the waters he proposed to transfuse into the golden cup of
+matrimony. Sometimes a word, a look, a gesture of Euphemia’s gave him
+the oddest sense of being, or of seeming at least, almost bashful;
+for she had a way of not dropping her eyes according to the mysterious
+virginal mechanism, of not fluttering out of the room when she found him
+there alone, of treating him rather as a glorious than as a pernicious
+influence--a radiant frankness of demeanour in fine, despite an
+infinite natural reserve, which it seemed at once graceless not to be
+complimentary about and indelicate not to take for granted. In this way
+had been wrought in the young man’s mind a vague unwonted resonance of
+soft impressions, as we may call it, which resembled the happy stir of
+the change from dreaming pleasantly to waking happily. His imagination
+was touched; he was very fond of music and he now seemed to give easy
+ear to some of the sweetest he had ever heard. In spite of the bore of
+being laid up with a lame knee he was in better humour than he had known
+for months; he lay smoking cigarettes and listening to the nightingales
+with the satisfied smile of one of his country neighbours whose big
+ox should have taken the prize at a fair. Every now and then, with an
+impatient suspicion of the resemblance, he declared himself pitifully
+bete; but he was under a charm that braved even the supreme penalty of
+seeming ridiculous. One morning he had half an hour’s tete-a-tete with
+his grandmother’s confessor, a soft-voiced old Abbe whom, for reasons of
+her own, Madame de Mauves had suddenly summoned and had left waiting in
+the drawing-room while she rearranged her curls. His reverence, going
+up to the old lady, assured her that M. le Comte was in a most edifying
+state of mind and the likeliest subject for the operation of grace. This
+was a theological interpretation of the count’s unusual equanimity.
+He had always lazily wondered what priests were good for, and he now
+remembered, with a sense of especial obligation to the Abbe, that they
+were excellent for marrying people.
+
+A day or two after this he left off his bandages and tried to walk. He
+made his way into the garden and hobbled successfully along one of the
+alleys, but in the midst of his progress was pulled up by a spasm of
+pain which forced him to stop and call for help. In an instant Euphemia
+came tripping along the path and offered him her arm with the frankest
+solicitude.
+
+“Not to the house,” he said, taking it; “further on, to the bosquet.”
+ This choice was prompted by her having immediately confessed that she
+had seen him leave the house, had feared an accident and had followed
+him on tiptoe.
+
+“Why didn’t you join me?” he had asked, giving her a look in which
+admiration was no longer disguised and yet felt itself half at the
+mercy of her replying that a jeune fille shouldn’t be seen following a
+gentleman. But it drew a breath which filled its lungs for a long time
+afterwards when she replied simply that if she had overtaken him he
+might have accepted her arm out of politeness, whereas she wished to
+have the pleasure of seeing him walk alone.
+
+The bosquet was covered with an odorous tangle of blossoming creepers,
+and a nightingale overhead was shaking out love-notes with a profusion
+that made the Count feel his own conduct the last word of propriety.
+“I’ve always heard that in America, when a man wishes to marry a
+young girl, he offers himself simply face to face and without
+ceremony--without parents and uncles and aunts and cousins sitting round
+in a circle.”
+
+“Why I believe so,” said Euphemia, staring and too surprised to be
+alarmed.
+
+“Very well then--suppose our arbour here to be your great sensible
+country. I offer you my hand a l’Americaine. It will make me intensely
+happy to feel you accept it.”
+
+Whether Euphemia’s acceptance was in the American manner is more than
+I can say; I incline to think that for fluttering grateful trustful
+softly-amazed young hearts there is only one manner all over the world.
+
+That evening, in the massive turret chamber it was her happiness to
+inhabit, she wrote a dutiful letter to her mamma, and had just sealed it
+when she was sent for by Madame de Mauves. She found this ancient lady
+seated in her boudoir in a lavender satin gown and with her candles all
+lighted as for the keeping of some fete. “Are you very happy?” the old
+woman demanded, making Euphemia sit down before her.
+
+“I’m almost afraid to say so, lest I should wake myself up.”
+
+“May you never wake up, belle enfant,” Madame de Mauves grandly
+returned. “This is the first marriage ever made in our family in this
+way--by a Comte de Mauves proposing to a young girl in an arbour like
+Jeannot and Jeannette. It has not been our way of doing things, and
+people may say it wants frankness. My grandson tells me he regards
+it--for the conditions--as the perfection of good taste. Very well. I’m
+a very old woman, and if your differences should ever be as marked as
+your agreements I shouldn’t care to see them. But I should be sorry
+to die and think you were going to be unhappy. You can’t be, my dear,
+beyond a certain point; because, though in this world the Lord sometimes
+makes light of our expectations he never altogether ignores our deserts.
+But you’re very young and innocent and easy to dazzle. There never was a
+man in the world--among the saints themselves--as good as you believe my
+grandson. But he’s a galant homme and a gentleman, and I’ve been talking
+to him to-night. To you I want to say this--that you’re to forget the
+worldly rubbish I talked the other day about the happiness of
+frivolous women. It’s not the kind of happiness that would suit you, ma
+toute-belle. Whatever befalls you, promise me this: to be, to remain,
+your own sincere little self only, charming in your own serious little
+way. The Comtesse de Mauves will be none the worse for it. Your brave
+little self, understand, in spite of everything--bad precepts and bad
+examples, bad fortune and even bad usage. Be persistently and patiently
+just what the good God has made you, and even one of us--and one of
+those who is most what we ARE--will do you justice!”
+
+Euphemia remembered this speech in after-years, and more than once,
+wearily closing her eyes, she seemed to see the old woman sitting
+upright in her faded finery and smiling grimly like one of the Fates
+who sees the wheel of fortune turning up her favourite event. But at the
+moment it had for her simply the proper gravity of the occasion: this
+was the way, she supposed, in which lucky young girls were addressed on
+their engagement by wise old women of quality.
+
+At her convent, to which she immediately returned, she found a letter
+from her mother which disconcerted her far more than the remarks of
+Madame de Mauves. Who were these people, Mrs. Cleve demanded, who had
+presumed to talk to her daughter of marriage without asking her leave?
+Questionable gentlefolk plainly; the best French people never did such
+things. Euphemia would return straightway to her convent, shut herself
+up and await her own arrival. It took Mrs. Cleve three weeks to
+travel from Nice to Paris, and during this time the young girl had
+no communication with her lover beyond accepting a bouquet of violets
+marked with his initials and left by a female friend. “I’ve not brought
+you up with such devoted care,” she declared to her daughter at their
+first interview, “to marry a presumptuous and penniless Frenchman. I
+shall take you straight home and you’ll please forget M. de Mauves.”
+
+Mrs. Cleve received that evening at her hotel a visit from this
+personage which softened her wrath but failed to modify her decision. He
+had very good manners, but she was sure he had horrible morals; and the
+lady, who had been a good-natured censor on her own account, felt a deep
+and real need to sacrifice her daughter to propriety. She belonged to
+that large class of Americans who make light of their native land
+in familiar discourse but are startled back into a sense of having
+blasphemed when they find Europeans taking them at their word. “I know
+the type, my dear,” she said to her daughter with a competent nod. “He
+won’t beat you. Sometimes you’ll wish he would.”
+
+Euphemia remained solemnly silent, for the only answer she felt capable
+of making was that her mother’s mind was too small a measure of things
+and her lover’s type an historic, a social masterpiece that it took some
+mystic illumination to appreciate. A person who confounded him with the
+common throng of her watering-place acquaintance was not a person to
+argue with. It struck the girl she had simply no cause to plead; her
+cause was in the Lord’s hands and in those of M. de Mauves.
+
+This agent of Providence had been irritated and mortified by Mrs.
+Cleve’s opposition, and hardly knew how to handle an adversary who
+failed to perceive that a member of his family gave of necessity more
+than he received. But he had obtained information on his return to Paris
+which exalted the uses of humility. Euphemia’s fortune, wonderful to
+say, was greater than its fame, and in view of such a prize, even a
+member of his family could afford to take a snubbing.
+
+The young man’s tact, his deference, his urbane insistence, won a
+concession from Mrs. Cleve. The engagement was to be put off and her
+daughter was to return home, be brought out and receive the homage she
+was entitled to and which might well take a form representing peril to
+the suit of this first headlong aspirant. They were to exchange neither
+letters nor mementoes nor messages; but if at the end of two years
+Euphemia had refused offers enough to attest the permanence of her
+attachment he should receive an invitation to address her again. This
+decision was promulgated in the presence of the parties interested.
+The Count bore himself gallantly, looking at his young friend as if he
+expected some tender protestation. But she only looked at him silently
+in return, neither weeping nor smiling nor putting out her hand. On this
+they separated, and as M. de Mauves walked away he declared to himself
+that in spite of the confounded two years he was one of the luckiest
+of men--to have a fiancee who to several millions of francs added such
+strangely beautiful eyes.
+
+How many offers Euphemia refused but scantily concerns us--and how the
+young man wore his two years away. He found he required pastimes, and
+as pastimes were expensive he added heavily to the list of debts to be
+cancelled by Euphemia’s fortune. Sometimes, in the thick of what he
+had once called pleasure with a keener conviction than now, he put to
+himself the case of their failing him after all; and then he remembered
+that last mute assurance of her pale face and drew a long breath of
+such confidence as he felt in nothing else in the world save his own
+punctuality in an affair of honour.
+
+At last, one morning, he took the express to Havre with a letter of Mrs.
+Cleve’s in his pocket, and ten days later made his bow to mother and
+daughter in New York. His stay was brief, and he was apparently unable
+to bring himself to view what Euphemia’s uncle, Mr. Butterworth, who
+gave her away at the altar, called our great experiment of democratic
+self-government, in a serious light. He smiled at everything and seemed
+to regard the New World as a colossal plaisanterie. It is true that a
+perpetual smile was the most natural expression of countenance for a man
+about to marry Euphemia Cleve.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+Longmore’s first visit seemed to open to him so large a range of quiet
+pleasure that he very soon paid a second, and at the end of a fortnight
+had spent uncounted hours in the little drawing-room which Madame de
+Mauves rarely quitted except to drive or walk in the forest. She
+lived in an old-fashioned pavilion, between a high-walled court and an
+excessively artificial garden, beyond whose enclosure you saw a long
+line of tree-tops. Longmore liked the garden and in the mild afternoons
+used to move his chair through the open window to the smooth terrace
+which overlooked it while his hostess sat just within. Presently she
+would come out and wander through the narrow alleys and beside the
+thin-spouting fountain, and at last introduce him to a private gate
+in the high wall, the opening to a lane which led to the forest.
+Hitherwards she more than once strolled with him, bareheaded and meaning
+to go but twenty rods, but always going good-naturedly further and often
+stretching it to the freedom of a promenade. They found many things to
+talk about, and to the pleasure of feeling the hours slip along
+like some silver stream Longmore was able to add the satisfaction of
+suspecting that he was a “resource” for Madame de Mauves. He had made
+her acquaintance with the sense, not wholly inspiring, that she was a
+woman with a painful twist in her life and that seeking her acquaintance
+would be like visiting at a house where there was an invalid who could
+bear no noise. But he very soon recognised that her grievance, if
+grievance it was, was not aggressive; that it was not fond of attitudes
+and ceremonies, and that her most earnest wish was to remember it as
+little as possible. He felt that even if Mrs. Draper hadn’t told him
+she was unhappy he would have guessed it, and yet that he couldn’t
+have pointed to his proof. The evidence was chiefly negative--she never
+alluded to her husband. Beyond this it seemed to him simply that her
+whole being was pitched in a lower key than harmonious Nature had
+designed; she was like a powerful singer who had lost her high notes.
+She never drooped nor sighed nor looked unutterable things; she dealt
+no sarcastic digs at her fate; she had in short none of the conscious
+graces of the woman wronged. Only Longmore was sure that her gentle
+gaiety was but the milder or sharper flush of a settled ache, and that
+she but tried to interest herself in his thoughts in order to escape
+from her own. If she had wished to irritate his curiosity and lead him
+to take her confidence by storm nothing could have served her purpose
+better than this studied discretion. He measured the rare magnanimity
+of self-effacement so deliberate, he felt how few women were capable of
+exchanging a luxurious woe for a thankless effort. Madame de Mauves,
+he himself felt, wasn’t sweeping the horizon for a compensation or a
+consoler; she had suffered a personal deception that had disgusted her
+with persons. She wasn’t planning to get the worth of her trouble back
+in some other way; for the present she was proposing to live with
+it peaceably, reputably and without scandal--turning the key on it
+occasionally as you would on a companion liable to attacks of insanity.
+Longmore was a man of fine senses and of a speculative spirit,
+leading-strings that had never been slipped. He began to regard his
+hostess as a figure haunted by a shadow which was somehow her intenser
+and more authentic self. This lurking duality in her put on for him an
+extraordinary charm. Her delicate beauty acquired to his eye the serious
+cast of certain blank-browed Greek statues; and sometimes when his
+imagination, more than his ear, detected a vague tremor in the tone in
+which she attempted to make a friendly question seem to have behind it
+none of the hollow resonance of absent-mindedness, his marvelling eyes
+gave her an answer more eloquent, though much less to the point, than
+the one she demanded.
+
+She supplied him indeed with much to wonder about, so that he fitted, in
+his ignorance, a dozen high-flown theories to her apparent history. She
+had married for love and staked her whole soul on it; of that he was
+convinced. She hadn’t changed her allegiance to be near Paris and her
+base of supplies of millinery; he was sure she had seen her perpetrated
+mistake in a light of which her present life, with its conveniences for
+shopping and its moral aridity, was the absolute negation. But by what
+extraordinary process of the heart--through what mysterious intermission
+of that moral instinct which may keep pace with the heart even when this
+organ is making unprecedented time--had she fixed her affections on an
+insolently frivolous Frenchman? Longmore needed no telling; he knew that
+M. de Mauves was both cynical and shallow; these things were stamped
+on his eyes, his nose, his mouth, his voice, his gesture, his step. Of
+Frenchwomen themselves, when all was said, our young man, full of nursed
+discriminations, went in no small fear; they all seemed to belong to the
+type of a certain fine lady to whom he had ventured to present a letter
+of introduction and whom, directly after his first visit to her, he had
+set down in his note-book as “metallic.” Why should Madame de Mauves
+have chosen a Frenchwoman’s lot--she whose nature had an atmospheric
+envelope absent even from the brightest metals? He asked her one day
+frankly if it had cost her nothing to transplant herself--if she weren’t
+oppressed with a sense of irreconcileable difference from “all these
+people.” She replied nothing at first, till he feared she might think
+it her duty to resent a question that made light of all her husband’s
+importances. He almost wished she would; it would seem a proof that
+her policy of silence had a limit. “I almost grew up here,” she said
+at last, “and it was here for me those visions of the future took
+shape that we all have when we begin to think or to dream beyond mere
+playtime. As matters stand one may be very American and yet arrange it
+with one’s conscience to live in Europe. My imagination perhaps--I had
+a little when I was younger--helped me to think I should find happiness
+here. And after all, for a woman, what does it signify? This isn’t
+America, no--this element, but it’s quite as little France. France is
+out there beyond the garden, France is in the town and the forest; but
+here, close about me, in my room and”--she paused a moment--“in my mind,
+it’s a nameless, and doubtless not at all remarkable, little country of
+my own. It’s not her country,” she added, “that makes a woman happy or
+unhappy.”
+
+Madame Clairin, Euphemia’s sister-in-law, might meanwhile have been
+supposed to have undertaken the graceful task of making Longmore ashamed
+of his uncivil jottings about her sex and nation. Mademoiselle de
+Mauves, bringing example to the confirmation of precept, had made
+a remunerative match and sacrificed her name to the millions of a
+prosperous and aspiring wholesale druggist--a gentleman liberal enough
+to regard his fortune as a moderate price for being towed into circles
+unpervaded by pharmaceutic odours. His system possibly was sound, but
+his own application of it to be deplored. M. Clairin’s head was turned
+by his good luck. Having secured an aristocratic wife he adopted an
+aristocratic vice and began to gamble at the Bourse. In an evil hour he
+lost heavily, and then staked heavily to recover himself. But he was
+to learn that the law of compensation works with no such pleasing
+simplicity, and he rolled to the dark bottom of his folly. There he felt
+everything go--his wits, his courage, his probity, everything that had
+made him what his fatuous marriage had so promptly unmade. He walked up
+the Rue Vivienne with his hands in his empty pockets and stood half an
+hour staring confusedly up and down the brave boulevard. People brushed
+against him and half a dozen carriages almost ran over him, until at
+last a policeman, who had been watching him for some time, took him by
+the arm and led him gently away. He looked at the man’s cocked hat and
+sword with tears in his eyes; he hoped for some practical application
+of the wrath of heaven, something that would express violently his
+dead-weight of self-abhorrence. The sergent de ville, however, only
+stationed him in the embrasure of a door, out of harm’s way, and walked
+off to supervise a financial contest between an old lady and a cabman.
+Poor M. Clairin had only been married a year, but he had had time to
+measure the great spirit of true children of the anciens preux. When
+night had fallen he repaired to the house of a friend and asked for
+a night’s lodging; and as his friend, who was simply his old head
+book-keeper and lived in a small way, was put to some trouble to
+accommodate him, “You must pardon me,” the poor man said, “but I can’t
+go home. I’m afraid of my wife!” Toward morning he blew his brains out.
+His widow turned the remnants of his property to better account than
+could have been expected and wore the very handsomest mourning. It was
+for this latter reason perhaps that she was obliged to retrench at other
+points and accept a temporary home under her brother’s roof.
+
+Fortune had played Madame Clairin a terrible trick, but had found an
+adversary and not a victim. Though quite without beauty she had always
+had what is called the grand air, and her air from this time forth was
+grander than ever. As she trailed about in her sable furbelows, tossing
+back her well-dressed head and holding up her vigilant long-handled
+eyeglass, she seemed to be sweeping the whole field of society and
+asking herself where she should pluck her revenge. Suddenly she espied
+it, ready made to her hand, in poor Longmore’s wealth and amiability.
+American dollars and American complaisance had made her brother’s
+fortune; why shouldn’t they make hers? She overestimated the wealth and
+misinterpreted the amiability; for she was sure a man could neither be
+so contented without being rich nor so “backward” without being weak.
+Longmore met her advances with a formal politeness that covered a
+good deal of unflattering discomposure. She made him feel deeply
+uncomfortable; and though he was at a loss to conceive how he could be
+an object of interest to a sharp Parisienne he had an indefinable sense
+of being enclosed in a magnetic circle, of having become the victim of
+an incantation. If Madame Clairin could have fathomed his Puritanic soul
+she would have laid by her wand and her book and dismissed him for an
+impossible subject. She gave him a moral chill, and he never named her
+to himself save as that dreadful woman--that awful woman. He did justice
+to her grand air, but for his pleasure he preferred the small air of
+Madame de Mauves; and he never made her his bow, after standing frigidly
+passive for five minutes to one of her gracious overtures to intimacy,
+without feeling a peculiar desire to ramble away into the forest, fling
+himself down on the warm grass and, staring up at the blue sky, forget
+that there were any women in nature who didn’t please like the swaying
+tree-tops. One day, on his arrival at the house, she met him in the
+court with the news that her sister-in-law was shut up with a
+headache and that his visit must be for HER. He followed her into the
+drawing-room with the best grace at his command, and sat twirling his
+hat for half an hour. Suddenly he understood her; her caressing cadences
+were so almost explicit an invitation to solicit the charming honour
+of her hand. He blushed to the roots of his hair and jumped up with
+uncontrollable alacrity; then, dropping a glance at Madame Clairin,
+who sat watching him with hard eyes over the thin edge of her smile,
+perceived on her brow a flash of unforgiving wrath. It was not pleasing
+in itself, but his eyes lingered a moment, for it seemed to show off her
+character. What he saw in the picture frightened him and he felt himself
+murmur “Poor Madame de Mauves!” His departure was abrupt, and this time
+he really went into the forest and lay down on the grass.
+
+After which he admired his young countrywoman more than ever; her
+intrinsic clearness shone out to him even through the darker shade cast
+over it. At the end of a month he received a letter from a friend with
+whom he had arranged a tour through the Low Countries, reminding him
+of his promise to keep their tryst at Brussels. It was only after his
+answer was posted that he fully measured the zeal with which he had
+declared that the journey must either be deferred or abandoned--since he
+couldn’t possibly leave Saint-Germain. He took a walk in the forest
+and asked himself if this were indeed portentously true. Such a truth
+somehow made it surely his duty to march straight home and put together
+his effects. Poor Webster, who, he knew, had counted ardently on this
+excursion, was the best of men; six weeks ago he would have gone through
+anything to join poor Webster. It had never been in his books to throw
+overboard a friend whom he had loved ten years for a married woman whom
+he had six weeks--well, admired. It was certainly beyond question that
+he hung on at Saint-Germain because this admirable married woman was
+there; but in the midst of so much admiration what had become of his
+fine old power to conclude? This was the conduct of a man not judging
+but drifting, and he had pretended never to drift. If she were as
+unhappy as he believed the active sympathy of such a man would help her
+very little more than his indifference; if she were less so she needed
+no help and could dispense with his professions. He was sure moreover
+that if she knew he was staying on her account she would be extremely
+annoyed. This very feeling indeed had much to do with making it hard
+to go; her displeasure would be the flush on the snow of the high cold
+stoicism that touched him to the heart. At moments withal he assured
+himself that staying to watch her--and what else did it come to?--was
+simply impertinent; it was gross to keep tugging at the cover of a book
+so intentionally closed. Then inclination answered that some day her
+self-support would fail, and he had a vision of this exquisite creature
+calling vainly for help. He would just be her friend to any length, and
+it was unworthy of either to think about consequences. He was a friend,
+however, who nursed a brooding regret for his not having known her
+five years earlier, as well as a particular objection to those who had
+smartly anticipated him. It seemed one of fortune’s most mocking strokes
+that she should be surrounded by persons whose only merit was that they
+threw every side of her, as she turned in her pain, into radiant relief.
+
+Our young man’s growing irritation made it more and more difficult for
+him to see any other merit than this in Richard de Mauves. And yet,
+disinterestedly, it would have been hard to give a name to the pitiless
+perversity lighted by such a conclusion, and there were times when
+Longmore was almost persuaded against his finer judgement that he was
+really the most considerate of husbands and that it was not a man’s
+fault if his wife’s love of life had pitched itself once for all in
+the minor key. The Count’s manners were perfect, his discretion
+irreproachable, and he seemed never to address his companion but,
+sentimentally speaking, hat in hand. His tone to Longmore--as the latter
+was perfectly aware--was that of a man of the world to a man not quite
+of the world; but what it lacked in true frankness it made up in easy
+form. “I can’t thank you enough for having overcome my wife’s shyness,”
+ he more than once declared. “If we left her to do as she pleased she
+would--in her youth and her beauty--bury herself all absurdly alive.
+Come often, and bring your good friends and compatriots--some of them
+are so amusing. She’ll have nothing to do with mine, but perhaps you’ll
+be able to offer her better son affaire.”
+
+M. de Mauves made these speeches with a bright assurance very amazing to
+our hero, who had an innocent belief that a man’s head may point out
+to him the shortcomings of his heart and make him ashamed of them.
+He couldn’t fancy him formed both to neglect his wife and to take the
+derisive view of her minding it. Longmore had at any rate an exasperated
+sense that this nobleman thought rather the less of their interesting
+friend on account of that very same fine difference of nature which
+so deeply stirred his own sympathies. He was rarely present during the
+sessions of the American visitor, and he made a daily journey to Paris,
+where he had de gros soucis d’affaires as he once mentioned--with an
+all-embracing flourish and not in the least in the tone of apology. When
+he appeared it was late in the evening and with an imperturbable air
+of being on the best of terms with every one and every thing which was
+peculiarly annoying if you happened to have a tacit quarrel with him.
+If he was an honest man he was an honest man somehow spoiled for
+confidence. Something he had, however, that his critic vaguely envied,
+something in his address, splendidly positive, a manner rounded
+and polished by the habit of conversation and the friction of full
+experience, an urbanity exercised for his own sake, not for his
+neighbour’s, which seemed the fruit of one of those strong temperaments
+that rule the inward scene better than the best conscience. The Count
+had plainly no sense for morals, and poor Longmore, who had the finest,
+would have been glad to borrow his recipe for appearing then so to range
+the whole scale of the senses. What was it that enabled him, short of
+being a monster with visibly cloven feet and exhaling brimstone, to
+misprize so cruelly a nature like his wife’s and to walk about the world
+with such a handsome invincible grin? It was the essential grossness of
+his imagination, which had nevertheless helped him to such a store of
+neat speeches. He could be highly polite and could doubtless be damnably
+impertinent, but the life of the spirit was a world as closed to him as
+the world of great music to a man without an ear. It was ten to one
+he didn’t in the least understand how his wife felt; he and his smooth
+sister had doubtless agreed to regard their relative as a Puritanical
+little person, of meagre aspirations and few talents, content with
+looking at Paris from the terrace and, as a special treat, having a
+countryman very much like herself to regale her with innocent echoes
+of their native wit. M. de Mauves was tired of his companion; he
+liked women who could, frankly, amuse him better. She was too dim, too
+delicate, too modest; she had too few arts, too little coquetry,
+too much charity. Lighting a cigar some day while he summed up his
+situation, her husband had probably decided she was incurably stupid.
+It was the same taste, in essence, our young man moralised, as the taste
+for M. Gerome and M. Baudry in painting and for M. Gustave Flaubert and
+M. Charles Baudelaire in literature. The Count was a pagan and his wife
+a Christian, and between them an impassable gulf. He was by race and
+instinct a grand seigneur. Longmore had often heard of that historic
+type, and was properly grateful for an opportunity to examine it
+closely. It had its elegance of outline, but depended on spiritual
+sources so remote from those of which he felt the living gush in his own
+soul that he found himself gazing at it, in irreconcileable antipathy,
+through a dim historic mist. “I’m a modern bourgeois,” he said, “and
+not perhaps so good a judge of how far a pretty woman’s tongue may go at
+supper before the mirrors properly crack to hear. But I’ve not met
+one of the rarest of women without recognising her, without making
+my reflexion that, charm for charm, such a maniere d’etre is more
+‘fetching’ even than the worst of Theresa’s songs sung by a dissipated
+duchess. Wit for wit, I think mine carries me further.” It was easy
+indeed to perceive that, as became a grand seigneur, M. de Mauves had a
+stock of social principles. He wouldn’t especially have desired perhaps
+that his wife should compete in amateur operettas with the duchesses in
+question, for the most part of comparatively recent origin; but he held
+that a gentleman may take his amusement where he finds it, that he
+is quite at liberty not to find it at home, and that even an adoptive
+daughter of his house who should hang her head and have red eyes and
+allow herself to make any other response to officious condolence than
+that her husband’s amusements were his own affair, would have forfeited
+every claim to having her finger-tips bowed over and kissed. And yet in
+spite of this definite faith Longmore figured him much inconvenienced
+by the Countess’s avoidance of betrayals. Did it dimly occur to him that
+the principle of this reserve was self-control and not self-effacement?
+She was a model to all the inferior matrons of his line, past and to
+come, and an occasional “scene” from her at a manageable hour would
+have had something reassuring--would have attested her stupidity rather
+better than this mere polish of her patience.
+
+Longmore would have given much to be able to guess how this latter
+secret worked, and he tried more than once, though timidly and awkwardly
+enough, to make out the game she was playing. She struck him as having
+long resisted the force of cruel evidence, and, as though succumbing to
+it at last, having denied herself on simple grounds of generosity the
+right to complain. Her faith might have perished, but the sense of her
+own old deep perversity remained. He believed her thus quite capable
+of reproaching herself with having expected too much and of trying to
+persuade herself out of her bitterness by saying that her hopes had been
+vanities and follies and that what was before her was simply Life. “I
+hate tragedy,” she once said to him; “I’m a dreadful coward about having
+to suffer or to bleed. I’ve always tried to believe that--without
+base concessions--such extremities may always somehow be dodged or
+indefinitely postponed. I should be willing to buy myself off, from
+having ever to be OVERWHELMED, by giving up--well, any amusement you
+like.” She lived evidently in nervous apprehension of being fatally
+convinced--of seeing to the end of her deception. Longmore, when he
+thought of this, felt the force of his desire to offer her something of
+which she could be as sure as of the sun in heaven.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+His friend Webster meanwhile lost no time in accusing him of the basest
+infidelity and in asking him what he found at suburban Saint-Germain to
+prefer to Van Eyck and Memling, Rubens and Rembrandt. A day or two after
+the receipt of this friend’s letter he took a walk with Madame de Mauves
+in the forest. They sat down on a fallen log and she began to arrange
+into a bouquet the anemones and violets she had gathered. “I’ve a word
+here,” he said at last, “from a friend whom I some time ago promised to
+join in Brussels. The time has come--it has passed. It finds me terribly
+unwilling to leave Saint-Germain.”
+
+She looked up with the immediate interest she always showed in
+his affairs, but with no hint of a disposition to make a personal
+application of his words. “Saint-Germain is pleasant enough, but are you
+doing yourself justice? Shan’t you regret in future days that instead
+of travelling and seeing cities and monuments and museums and improving
+your mind you simply sat here--for instance--on a log and pulled my
+flowers to pieces?”
+
+“What I shall regret in future days,” he answered after some hesitation,
+“is that I should have sat here--sat here so much--and never have shown
+what’s the matter with me. I’m fond of museums and monuments and of
+improving my mind, and I’m particularly fond of my friend Webster. But I
+can’t bring myself to leave Saint-Germain without asking you a question.
+You must forgive me if it’s indiscreet and be assured that curiosity
+was never more respectful. Are you really as unhappy as I imagine you to
+be?”
+
+She had evidently not expected his appeal, and, making her change
+colour, it took her unprepared. “If I strike you as unhappy,” she none
+the less simply said, “I’ve been a poorer friend to you than I wished to
+be.”
+
+“I, perhaps, have been a better friend of yours than you’ve supposed,”
+ he returned. “I’ve admired your reserve, your courage, your studied
+gaiety. But I’ve felt the existence of something beneath them that was
+more YOU--more you as I wished to know you--than they were; some trouble
+in you that I’ve permitted myself to hate and resent.”
+
+She listened all gravely, but without an air of offence, and he felt
+that while he had been timorously calculating the last consequences of
+friendship she had quietly enough accepted them. “You surprise me,” she
+said slowly, and her flush still lingered. “But to refuse to answer
+you would confirm some impression in you even now much too strong. Any
+‘trouble’--if you mean any unhappiness--that one can sit comfortably
+talking about is an unhappiness with distinct limitations. If I were
+examined before a board of commissioners for testing the felicity of
+mankind I’m sure I should be pronounced a very fortunate woman.” There
+was something that deeply touched him in her tone, and this quality
+pierced further as she continued. “But let me add, with all gratitude
+for your sympathy, that it’s my own affair altogether. It needn’t
+disturb you, my dear sir,” she wound up with a certain quaintness of
+gaiety, “for I’ve often found myself in your company contented enough
+and diverted enough.”
+
+“Well, you’re a wonderful woman,” the young man declared, “and I admire
+you as I’ve never admired any one. You’re wiser than anything I, for
+one, can say to you; and what I ask of you is not to let me advise
+or console you, but simply thank you for letting me know you.” He had
+intended no such outburst as this, but his voice rang loud and he felt
+an unfamiliar joy as he uttered it.
+
+She shook her head with some impatience. “Let us be friends--as I
+supposed we were going to be--without protestations and fine words.
+To have you paying compliments to my wisdom--that would be real
+wretchedness. I can dispense with your admiration better than the
+Flemish painters can--better than Van Eyck and Rubens, in spite of
+all their worshippers. Go join your friend--see everything, enjoy
+everything, learn everything, and write me an excellent letter, brimming
+over with your impressions. I’m extremely fond of the Dutch painters,”
+ she added with the faintest quaver in the world, an impressible break of
+voice that Longmore had noticed once or twice before and had interpreted
+as the sudden weariness, the controlled convulsion, of a spirit
+self-condemned to play a part.
+
+“I don’t believe you care a button for the Dutch painters,” he said with
+a laugh. “But I shall certainly write you a letter.”
+
+She rose and turned homeward, thoughtfully rearranging her flowers
+as she walked. Little was said; Longmore was asking himself with an
+agitation of his own in the unspoken words whether all this meant
+simply that he was in love. He looked at the rooks wheeling against the
+golden-hued sky, between the tree-tops, but not at his companion, whose
+personal presence seemed lost in the felicity she had created. Madame de
+Mauves was silent and grave--she felt she had almost grossly failed and
+she was proportionately disappointed. An emotional friendship she had
+not desired; her scheme had been to pass with her visitor as a placid
+creature with a good deal of leisure which she was disposed to devote to
+profitable conversation of an impersonal sort. She liked him extremely,
+she felt in him the living force of something to which, when she made up
+her girlish mind that a needy nobleman was the ripest fruit of time,
+she had done too scant justice. They went through the little gate in the
+garden-wall and approached the house. On the terrace Madame Clairin was
+entertaining a friend--a little elderly gentleman with a white moustache
+and an order in his buttonhole. Madame de Mauves chose to pass round
+the house into the court; whereupon her sister-in-law, greeting Longmore
+with an authoritative nod, lifted her eye-glass and stared at them as
+they went by. Longmore heard the little old gentleman uttering some
+old-fashioned epigram about “la vieille galanterie francaise”--then by
+a sudden impulse he looked at Madame de Mauves and wondered what she was
+doing in such a world. She stopped before the house, not asking him to
+come in. “I hope you will act on my advice and waste no more time at
+Saint-Germain.”
+
+For an instant there rose to his lips some faded compliment about his
+time not being wasted, but it expired before the simple sincerity of
+her look. She stood there as gently serious as the angel of
+disinterestedness, and it seemed to him he should insult her by treating
+her words as a bait for flattery. “I shall start in a day or two,” he
+answered, “but I won’t promise you not to come back.”
+
+“I hope not,” she said simply. “I expect to be here a long time.”
+
+“I shall come and say good-bye,” he returned--which she appeared to
+accept with a smile as she went in.
+
+He stood a moment, then walked slowly homeward by the terrace. It seemed
+to him that to leave her thus, for a gain on which she herself insisted,
+was to know her better and admire her more. But he was aware of a vague
+ferment of feeling which her evasion of his question half an hour before
+had done more to deepen than to allay. In the midst of it suddenly, on
+the great terrace of the Chateau, he encountered M. de Mauves, planted
+there against the parapet and finishing a cigar. The Count, who, he
+thought he made out, had an air of peculiar affability, offered him his
+white plump hand. Longmore stopped; he felt a sharp, a sore desire to
+cry out to him that he had the most precious wife in the world, that
+he ought to be ashamed of himself not to know it, and that for all his
+grand assurance he had never looked down into the depths of her eyes.
+Richard de Mauves, we have seen, considered he had; but there was
+doubtless now something in this young woman’s eyes that had not been
+there five years before. The two men conversed formally enough, and
+M. de Mauves threw off a light bright remark or two about his visit to
+America. His tone was not soothing to Longmore’s excited sensibilities.
+He seemed to have found the country a gigantic joke, and his blandness
+went but so far as to allow that jokes on that scale are indeed
+inexhaustible. Longmore was not by habit an aggressive apologist for the
+seat of his origin, but the Count’s easy diagnosis confirmed his worst
+estimate of French superficiality. He had understood nothing, felt
+nothing, learned nothing, and his critic, glancing askance at his
+aristocratic profile, declared that if the chief merit of a long
+pedigree was to leave one so fatuously stupid he thanked goodness the
+Longmores had emerged from obscurity in the present century and in the
+person of an enterprising timber-merchant. M. de Mauves dwelt of course
+on that prime oddity of the American order--the liberty allowed the
+fairer half of the unmarried young, and confessed to some personal study
+of the “occasions” it offered to the speculative visitor; a line of
+research in which, during a fortnight’s stay, he had clearly spent his
+most agreeable hours. “I’m bound to admit,” he said, “that in every case
+I was disarmed by the extreme candour of the young lady, and that they
+took care of themselves to better purpose than I have seen some mammas
+in France take care of them.” Longmore greeted this handsome concession
+with the grimmest of smiles and damned his impertinent patronage.
+
+Mentioning, however, at last that he was about to leave Saint-Germain,
+he was surprised, without exactly being flattered, by his interlocutor’s
+quickened attention. “I’m so very sorry; I hoped we had you for the
+whole summer.” Longmore murmured something civil and wondered why M.
+de Mauves should care whether he stayed or went. “You’ve been a real
+resource to Madame de Mauves,” the Count added; “I assure you I’ve
+mentally blessed your visits.”
+
+“They were a great pleasure to me,” Longmore said gravely. “Some day I
+expect to come back.”
+
+“Pray do”--and the Count made a great and friendly point of it. “You see
+the confidence I have in you.” Longmore said nothing and M. de Mauves
+puffed his cigar reflectively and watched the smoke. “Madame de Mauves,”
+ he said at last, “is a rather singular person.” And then while our young
+man shifted his position and wondered whether he was going to “explain”
+ Madame de Mauves, “Being, as you are, her fellow countryman,” this
+lady’s husband pursued, “I don’t mind speaking frankly. She’s a little
+overstrained; the most charming woman in the world, as you see, but
+a little volontaire and morbid. Now you see she has taken this
+extraordinary fancy for solitude. I can’t get her to go anywhere, to see
+any one. When my friends present themselves she’s perfectly polite, but
+it cures them of coming again. She doesn’t do herself justice, and I
+expect every day to hear two or three of them say to me, ‘Your wife’s
+jolie a croquer: what a pity she hasn’t a little esprit.’ You must
+have found out that she has really a great deal. But, to tell the whole
+truth, what she needs is to forget herself. She sits alone for hours
+poring over her English books and looking at life through that terrible
+brown fog they seem to me--don’t they?--to fling over the world. I
+doubt if your English authors,” the Count went on with a serenity which
+Longmore afterwards characterised as sublime, “are very sound reading
+for young married women. I don’t pretend to know much about them; but I
+remember that not long after our marriage Madame de Mauves undertook to
+read me one day some passages from a certain Wordsworth--a poet highly
+esteemed, it appears, chez vous. It was as if she had taken me by the
+nape of the neck and held my head for half an hour over a basin of soupe
+aux choux: I felt as if we ought to ventilate the drawing-room before
+any one called. But I suppose you know him--ce genie-la. Every nation
+has its own ideals of every kind, but when I remember some of OUR
+charming writers! I think at all events my wife never forgave me and
+that it was a real shock to her to find she had married a man who had
+very much the same taste in literature as in cookery. But you’re a man
+of general culture, a man of the world,” said M. de Mauves, turning to
+Longmore but looking hard at the seal of his watchguard. “You can talk
+about everything, and I’m sure you like Alfred de Musset as well as
+Monsieur Wordsworth. Talk to her about everything you can, Alfred de
+Musset included. Bah! I forgot you’re going. Come back then as soon as
+possible and report on your travels. If my wife too would make a little
+voyage it would do her great good. It would enlarge her horizon”--and
+M. de Mauves made a series of short nervous jerks with his stick in the
+air--“it would wake up her imagination. She’s too much of one piece,
+you know--it would show her how much one may bend without breaking.” He
+paused a moment and gave two or three vigorous puffs. Then turning
+to his companion again with eyebrows expressively raised: “I hope you
+admire my candour. I beg you to believe I wouldn’t say such things to
+one of US!”
+
+Evening was at hand and the lingering light seemed to charge the air
+with faintly golden motes. Longmore stood gazing at these luminous
+particles; he could almost have fancied them a swarm of humming insects,
+the chorus of a refrain: “She has a great deal of esprit--she has
+a great deal of esprit.” “Yes,--she has a great deal,” he said
+mechanically, turning to the Count. M. de Mauves glanced at him sharply,
+as if to ask what the deuce he was talking about. “She has a great deal
+of intelligence,” said Longmore quietly, “a great deal of beauty, a
+great many virtues.”
+
+M. de Mauves busied himself for a moment in lighting another cigar,
+and when he had finished, with a return of his confidential smile,
+“I suspect you of thinking that I don’t do my wife justice.” he made
+answer. “Take care--take care, young man; that’s a dangerous assumption.
+In general a man always does his wife justice. More than justice,” the
+Count laughed--“that we keep for the wives of other men!”
+
+Longmore afterwards remembered in favour of his friend’s fine manner
+that he had not measured at this moment the dusky abyss over which
+it hovered. Hut a deepening subterranean echo, loudest at the last,
+lingered on his spiritual ear. For the present his keenest sensation was
+a desire to get away and cry aloud that M. de Mauves was no better than
+a pompous dunce. He bade him an abrupt good-night, which was to serve
+also, he said, as good-bye.
+
+“Decidedly then you go?” It was spoken almost with the note of
+irritation.
+
+“Decidedly.”
+
+“But of course you’ll come and take leave--?” His manner implied that
+the omission would be uncivil, but there seemed to Longmore himself
+something so ludicrous in his taking a lesson in consideration from M.
+de Mauves that he put the appeal by with a laugh. The Count frowned as
+if it were a new and unpleasant sensation for him to be left at a loss.
+“Ah you people have your facons!” he murmured as Longmore turned away,
+not foreseeing that he should learn still more about his facons before
+he had done with him.
+
+Longmore sat down to dinner at his hotel with his usual good intentions,
+but in the act of lifting his first glass of wine to his lips he
+suddenly fell to musing and set down the liquor untasted. This mood
+lasted long, and when he emerged from it his fish was cold; but that
+mattered little, for his appetite was gone. That evening he packed his
+trunk with an indignant energy. This was so effective that the operation
+was accomplished before bedtime, and as he was not in the least sleepy
+he devoted the interval to writing two letters, one of them a short note
+to Madame de Mauves, which he entrusted to a servant for delivery the
+next morning. He had found it best, he said, to leave Saint-Germain
+immediately, but he expected to return to Paris early in the autumn. The
+other letter was the result of his having remembered a day or two before
+that he had not yet complied with Mrs. Draper’s injunction to give her
+an account of his impression of her friend. The present occasion seemed
+propitious, and he wrote half a dozen pages. His tone, however,
+was grave, and Mrs. Draper, on reading him over, was slightly
+disappointed--she would have preferred he should have “raved” a little
+more. But what chiefly concerns us is the concluding passage.
+
+“The only time she ever spoke to me of her marriage,” he wrote, “she
+intimated that it had been a perfect love-match. With all abatements, I
+suppose, this is what most marriages take themselves to be; but it would
+mean in her case, I think, more than in that of most women, for her love
+was an absolute idealisation. She believed her husband to be a hero of
+rose-coloured romance, and he turns out to be not even a hero of very
+sad-coloured reality. For some time now she has been sounding her
+mistake, but I don’t believe she has yet touched the bottom. She strikes
+me as a person who’s begging off from full knowledge--who has patched up
+a peace with some painful truth and is trying a while the experiment of
+living with closed eyes. In the dark she tries to see again the gilding
+on her idol. Illusion of course is illusion, and one must always pay for
+it; but there’s something truly tragical in seeing an earthly penalty
+levied on such divine folly as this. As for M. de Mauves he’s a shallow
+Frenchman to his fingers’ ends, and I confess I should dislike him for
+this if he were a much better man. He can’t forgive his wife for having
+married him too extravagantly and loved him too well; since he feels, I
+suppose, in some uncorrupted corner of his being that as she originally
+saw him so he ought to have been. It disagrees with him somewhere that
+a little American bourgeoise should have fancied him a finer fellow
+than he is or than he at all wants to be. He hasn’t a glimmering of real
+acquaintance with his wife; he can’t understand the stream of passion
+flowing so clear and still. To tell the truth I hardly understand it
+myself, but when I see the sight I find I greatly admire it. The Count
+at any rate would have enjoyed the comfort of believing his wife as bad
+a case as himself, and you’ll hardly believe me when I assure you he
+goes about intimating to gentlemen whom he thinks it may concern that
+it would be a convenience to him they should make love to Madame de
+Mauves.”
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+On reaching Paris Longmore straightaway purchased a Murray’s “Belgium”
+ to help himself to believe that he would start on the morrow for
+Brussels; but when the morrow came it occurred to him that he ought by
+way of preparation to acquaint himself more intimately with the Flemish
+painters in the Louvre. This took a whole morning, but it did little
+to hasten his departure. He had abruptly left Saint-Germain because
+it seemed to him that respect for Madame de Mauves required he should
+bequeath her husband no reason to suppose he had, as it were, taken a
+low hint; but now that he had deferred to that scruple he found himself
+thinking more and more ardently of his friend. It was a poor expression
+of ardour to be lingering irresolutely on the forsaken boulevard, but
+he detested the idea of leaving Saint-Germain five hundred miles behind
+him. He felt very foolish, nevertheless, and wandered about nervously,
+promising himself to take the next train. A dozen trains started,
+however, and he was still in Paris. This inward ache was more than he
+had bargained for, and as he looked at the shop-windows he wondered if
+it represented a “passion.” He had never been fond of the word and had
+grown up with much mistrust of what it stood for. He had hoped that
+when he should fall “really” in love he should do it with an excellent
+conscience, with plenty of confidence and joy, doubtless, but no strange
+soreness, no pangs nor regrets. Here was a sentiment concocted of pity
+and anger as well as of admiration, and bristling with scruples and
+doubts and fears. He had come abroad to enjoy the Flemish painters and
+all others, but what fair-tressed saint of Van Eyck or Memling was so
+interesting a figure as the lonely lady of Saint-Germain? His restless
+steps carried him at last out of the long villa-bordered avenue which
+leads to the Bois de Boulogne.
+
+Summer had fairly begun and the drive beside the lake was empty, but
+there were various loungers on the benches and chairs, and the great
+cafe had an air of animation. Longmore’s walk had given him an appetite,
+and he went into the establishment and demanded a dinner, remarking for
+the hundredth time, as he admired the smart little tables disposed in
+the open air, how much better (than anywhere else) they ordered this
+matter in France. “Will monsieur dine in the garden or in the salon?”
+ the waiter blandly asked. Longmore chose the garden and, observing that
+a great cluster of June roses was trained over the wall of the house,
+placed himself at a table near by, where the best of dinners was served
+him on the whitest of linen and in the most shining of porcelain. It so
+happened that his table was near a window and that as he sat he could
+look into a corner of the salon. So it was that his attention rested
+on a lady seated just within the window, which was open, face to face
+apparently with a companion who was concealed by the curtain. She was a
+very pretty woman, and Longmore looked at her as often as was consistent
+with good manners. After a while he even began to wonder who she was and
+finally to suspect that she was one of those ladies whom it is no breach
+of good manners to look at as often as you like. Our young man too, if
+he had been so disposed, would have been the more free to give her all
+his attention that her own was fixed upon the person facing her. She was
+what the French call a belle brune, and though Longmore, who had rather
+a conservative taste in such matters, was but half-charmed by her bold
+outlines and even braver complexion, he couldn’t help admiring her
+expression of basking contentment.
+
+She was evidently very happy, and her happiness gave her an air of
+innocence. The talk of her friend, whoever he was, abundantly suited
+her humour, for she sat listening to him with a broad idle smile and
+interrupting him fitfully, while she crunched her bonbons, with a
+murmured response, presumably as broad, which appeared to have the
+effect of launching him again. She drank a great deal of champagne and
+ate an immense number of strawberries, and was plainly altogether a
+person with an impartial relish for strawberries, champagne and what she
+doubtless would have called betises.
+
+They had half-finished dinner when Longmore sat down, and he was still
+in his place when they rose. She had hung her bonnet on a nail above her
+chair, and her companion passed round the table to take it down for her.
+As he did so she bent her head to look at a wine-stain on her dress, and
+in the movement exposed the greater part of the back of a very handsome
+neck. The gentleman observed it, and observed also, apparently, that the
+room beyond them was empty; that he stood within eyeshot of Longmore he
+failed to observe. He stooped suddenly and imprinted a gallant kiss on
+the fair expanse. In the author of this tribute Longmore then recognised
+Richard de Mauves. The lady to whom it had been rendered put on her
+bonnet, using his flushed smile as a mirror, and in a moment they passed
+through the garden on their way to their carriage. Then for the first
+time M. de Mauves became aware of his wife’s young friend. He measured
+with a rapid glance this spectator’s relation to the open window and
+checked himself in the impulse to stop and speak to him. He contented
+himself with bowing all imperturbably as he opened the gate for his
+companion.
+
+That evening Longmore made a railway journey, but not to Brussels. He
+had effectually ceased to care for Brussels; all he cared for in the
+world now was Madame de Mauves. The air of his mind had had a sudden
+clearing-up; pity and anger were still throbbing there, but they had
+space to range at their pleasure, for doubts and scruples had abruptly
+departed. It was little, he felt, that he could interpose between her
+resignation and the indignity of her position; but that little, if it
+involved the sacrifice of everything that bound him to the tranquil
+past, he could offer her with a rapture which at last made stiff
+resistance a terribly inferior substitute for faith. Nothing in his
+tranquil past had given such a zest to consciousness as this happy sense
+of choosing to go straight back to Saint-Germain. How to justify his
+return, how to explain his ardour, troubled him little. He wasn’t even
+sure he wished to be understood; he wished only to show how little by
+any fault of his Madame de Mauves was alone so with the harshness of
+fate. He was conscious of no distinct desire to “make love” to her; if
+he could have uttered the essence of his longing he would have said that
+he wished her to remember that in a world coloured grey to her vision
+by the sense of her mistake there was one vividly honest man. She might
+certainly have remembered it, however, without his coming back to remind
+her; and it is not to be denied that as he waited for the morrow he
+longed immensely for the sound of her voice.
+
+He waited the next day till his usual hour of calling--the late
+afternoon; but he learned at the door that the mistress of the house was
+not at home. The servant offered the information that she was walking
+a little way in the forest. Longmore went through the garden and out
+of the small door into the lane, and, after half an hour’s vain
+exploration, saw her coming toward him at the end of a green by-path. As
+he appeared she stopped a moment, as if to turn aside; then recognising
+him she slowly advanced and had presently taken the hand he held out.
+
+“Nothing has happened,” she said with her beautiful eyes on him. “You’re
+not ill?”
+
+“Nothing except that when I got to Paris I found how fond I had grown of
+Saint-Germain.”
+
+She neither smiled nor looked flattered; it seemed indeed to Longmore
+that she took his reappearance with no pleasure. But he was uncertain,
+for he immediately noted that in his absence the whole character of her
+face had changed. It showed him something momentous had happened. It was
+no longer self-contained melancholy that he read in her eyes, but grief
+and agitation which had lately struggled with the passionate love of
+peace ruling her before all things else, and forced her to know that
+deep experience is never peaceful. She was pale and had evidently been
+shedding tears. He felt his heart beat hard--he seemed now to touch
+her secret. She continued to look at him with a clouded brow, as if his
+return had surrounded her with complications too great to be disguised
+by a colourless welcome. For some moments, as he turned and walked
+beside her, neither spoke; then abruptly, “Tell me truly, Mr. Longmore,”
+ she said, “why you’ve come back.” He inclined himself to her, almost
+pulling up again, with an air that startled her into a certainty of what
+she had feared. “Because I’ve learned the real answer to the question I
+asked you the other day. You’re not happy--you’re too good to be happy
+on the terms offered you. Madame de Mauves,” he went on with a gesture
+which protested against a gesture of her own, “I can’t be happy, you
+know, when you’re as little so as I make you out. I don’t care for
+anything so long as I only feel helpless and sore about you. I found
+during those dreary days in Paris that the thing in life I most care for
+is this daily privilege of seeing you. I know it’s very brutal to tell
+you I admire you; it’s an insult to you to treat you as if you had
+complained to me or appealed to me. But such a friendship as I waked up
+to there”--and he tossed his head toward the distant city--“is a potent
+force, I assure you. When forces are stupidly stifled they explode.
+However,” he went on, “if you had told me every trouble in your heart it
+would have mattered little; I couldn’t say more than I--that if that
+in life from which you’ve hoped most has given you least, this devoted
+respect of mine will refuse no service and betray no trust.”
+
+She had begun to make marks in the earth with the point of her parasol,
+but she stopped and listened to him in perfect immobility--immobility
+save for the appearance by the time he had stopped speaking of a flush
+in her guarded clearness. Such as it was it told Longmore she was moved,
+and his first perceiving it was the happiest moment of his life. She
+raised her eyes at last, and they uttered a plea for non-insistence that
+unspeakably touched him.
+
+“Thank you--thank you!” she said calmly enough; but the next moment
+her own emotion baffled this pretence, a convulsion shook her for ten
+seconds and she burst into tears. Her tears vanished as quickly as
+they came, but they did Longmore a world of good. He had always felt
+indefinably afraid of her; her being had somehow seemed fed by a deeper
+faith and a stronger will than his own; but her half-dozen smothered
+sobs showed him the bottom of her heart and convinced him she was weak
+enough to be grateful. “Excuse me,” she said; “I’m too nervous to listen
+to you. I believe I could have dealt with an enemy to-day, but I can’t
+bear up under a friend.”
+
+“You’re killing yourself with stoicism--that’s what is the matter with
+you!” he cried. “Listen to a friend for his own sake if not for yours.
+I’ve never presumed to offer you an atom of compassion, and you can’t
+accuse yourself of an abuse of charity.”
+
+She looked about her as under the constraint of this appeal, but it
+promised him a reluctant attention. Noting, however, by the wayside the
+fallen log on which they had rested a few evenings before, she went and
+sat down on it with a resigned grace while the young man, silent before
+her and watching her, took from her the mute assurance that if she was
+charitable now he must at least be very wise.
+
+“Something came to my knowledge yesterday,” he said as he sat down
+beside her, “which gave me an intense impression of your loneliness.
+You’re truth itself, and there’s no truth about you. You believe in
+purity and duty and dignity, and you live in a world in which they’re
+daily belied. I ask myself with vain rage how you ever came into such a
+world, and why the perversity of fate never let me know you before.”
+
+She waited a little; she looked down, straight before her. “I like my
+‘world’ no better than you do, and it was not for its own sake I came
+into it. But what particular group of people is worth pinning one’s
+faith upon? I confess it sometimes seems to me men and women are very
+poor creatures. I suppose I’m too romantic and always was. I’ve an
+unfortunate taste for poetic fitness. Life’s hard prose, and one must
+learn to read prose contentedly. I believe I once supposed all the
+prose to be in America, which was very foolish. What I thought, what I
+believed, what I expected, when I was an ignorant girl fatally addicted
+to falling in love with my own theories, is more than I can begin
+to tell you now. Sometimes when I remember certain impulses, certain
+illusions of those days they take away my breath, and I wonder that my
+false point of view hasn’t led me into troubles greater than any I’ve
+now to lament. I had a conviction which you’d probably smile at if
+I were to attempt to express it to you. It was a singular form for
+passionate faith to take, but it had all of the sweetness and the ardour
+of passionate faith. It led me to take a great step, and it lies
+behind me now, far off, a vague deceptive form melting in the light of
+experience. It has faded, but it hasn’t vanished. Some feelings, I’m
+sure, die only with ourselves; some illusions are as much the condition
+of our life as our heart-beats. They say that life itself is an
+illusion--that this world is a shadow of which the reality is yet
+to come. Life is all of a piece then and there’s no shame in being
+miserably human. As for my loneliness, it doesn’t greatly matter; it is
+the fault in part of my obstinacy. There have been times when I’ve been
+frantically distressed and, to tell you the truth, wretchedly homesick,
+because my maid--a jewel of a maid--lied to me with every second breath.
+There have been moments when I’ve wished I was the daughter of a poor
+New England minister--living in a little white house under a couple of
+elms and doing all the housework.”
+
+She had begun to speak slowly, with reserve and effort; but she went on
+quickly and as if talk were at last a relief. “My marriage introduced me
+to people and things which seemed to me at first very strange and then
+very horrible, and then, to tell the truth, of very little importance.
+At first I expended a great deal of sorrow and dismay and pity on it
+all; but there soon came a time when I began to wonder if it were worth
+one’s tears. If I could tell you the eternal friendships I’ve seen
+broken, the inconsolable woes consoled, the jealousies and vanities
+scrambling to outdo each other, you’d agree with me that tempers
+like yours and mine can understand neither such troubles nor such
+compensations. A year ago, while I was in the country, a friend of mine
+was in despair at the infidelity of her husband; she wrote me a most
+dolorous letter, and on my return to Paris I went immediately to see
+her. A week had elapsed, and as I had seen stranger things I thought
+she might have recovered her spirits. Not at all; she was still in
+despair--but at what? At the conduct, the abandoned, shameless conduct
+of--well of a lady I’ll call Madame de T. You’ll imagine of course that
+Madame de T. was the lady whom my friend’s husband preferred to his
+wife. Far from it; he had never seen her. Who then was Madame de T.?
+Madame de T. was cruelly devoted to M. de V. And who was M. de V.? M.
+de V. was--well, in two words again, my friend was cultivating two
+jealousies at once. I hardly know what I said to her; something at any
+rate that she found unpardonable, for she quite gave me up. Shortly
+afterwards my husband proposed we should cease to live in Paris, and I
+gladly assented, for I believe I had taken a turn of spirits that made
+me a detestable companion. I should have preferred to go quite into the
+country, into Auvergne, where my husband has a house. But to him Paris
+in some degree is necessary, and Saint-Germain has been a conscious
+compromise.”
+
+“A conscious compromise!” Longmore expressively repeated. “That’s your
+whole life.”
+
+“It’s the life of many people,” she made prompt answer--“of most people
+of quiet tastes, and it’s certainly better than acute distress. One’s
+at a loss theoretically to defend compromises; but if I found a poor
+creature who had managed to arrive at one I should think myself not
+urgently called to expose its weak side.” But she had no sooner uttered
+these words than she laughed all amicably, as if to mitigate their too
+personal application.
+
+“Heaven forbid one should do that unless one has something better to
+offer,” Longmore returned. “And yet I’m haunted by the dream of a life
+in which you should have found no compromises, for they’re a perversion
+of natures that tend only to goodness and rectitude. As I see it you
+should have found happiness serene, profound, complete; a femme de
+chambre not a jewel perhaps, but warranted to tell but one fib a day; a
+society possibly rather provincial, but--in spite of your poor opinion
+of mankind--a good deal of solid virtue; jealousies and vanities very
+tame, and no particular iniquities and adulteries. A husband,” he added
+after a moment--“a husband of your own faith and race and spiritual
+substance, who would have loved you well.”
+
+She rose to her feet, shaking her head. “You’re very kind to go to the
+expense of such dazzling visions for me. Visions are vain things; we
+must make the best of the reality we happen to be in for.”
+
+“And yet,” said Longmore, provoked by what seemed the very wantonness of
+her patience, “the reality YOU ‘happen to be in for’ has, if I’m not in
+error, very recently taken a shape that keenly tests your philosophy.”
+
+She seemed on the point of replying that his sympathy was too zealous;
+but a couple of impatient tears in his eyes proved it founded on a
+devotion of which she mightn’t make light. “Ah philosophy?” she echoed.
+“I HAVE none. Thank heaven,” she cried with vehemence, “I have none!
+I believe, Mr. Longmore,” she added in a moment, “that I’ve nothing on
+earth but a conscience--it’s a good time to tell you so--nothing but a
+dogged obstinate clinging conscience. Does that prove me to be indeed of
+your faith and race, and have you one yourself for which you can say as
+much? I don’t speak in vanity, for I believe that if my conscience may
+prevent me from doing anything very base it will effectually prevent me
+also from doing anything very fine.”
+
+“I’m delighted to hear it,” her friend returned with high
+emphasis--“that proves we’re made for each other. It’s very certain I
+too shall never cut a great romantic figure. And yet I’ve fancied that
+in my case the unaccommodating organ we speak of might be blinded and
+gagged a while, in a really good cause, if not turned out of doors.
+In yours,” he went on with the same appealing irony, “is it absolutely
+beyond being ‘squared’?”
+
+But she made no concession to his tone. “Don’t laugh at your
+conscience,” she answered gravely; “that’s the only blasphemy I know.”
+
+She had hardly spoken when she turned suddenly at an unexpected sound,
+and at the same moment he heard a footstep in an adjacent by-path which
+crossed their own at a short distance from where they stood.
+
+“It’s M. de Mauves,” she said at once; with which she moved slowly
+forward. Longmore, wondering how she knew without seeing, had overtaken
+her by the time her husband came into view. A solitary walk in the
+forest was a pastime to which M. de Mauves was not addicted, but he
+seemed on this occasion to have resorted to it with some equanimity. He
+was smoking a fragrant cigar and had thrust his thumb into the armhole
+of his waistcoat with the air of a man thinking at his ease. He stopped
+short with surprise on seeing his wife and her companion, and his
+surprise had for Longmore even the pitch of impertinence. He glanced
+rapidly from one to the other, fixed the young man’s own look sharply a
+single instant and then lifted his hat with formal politeness.
+
+“I was not aware,” he said, turning to Madame de Mauves, “that I might
+congratulate you on the return of monsieur.”
+
+“You should at once have known it,” she immediately answered, “if I had
+expected such a pleasure.”
+
+She had turned very pale, and Longmore felt this to be a first meeting
+after some commotion. “My return was unexpected to myself,” he said to
+her husband. “I came back last night.”
+
+M. de Mauves seemed to express such satisfaction as could consort with
+a limited interest. “It’s needless for me to make you welcome. Madame
+de Mauves knows the duties of hospitality.” And with another bow he
+continued his walk.
+
+She pursued her homeward course with her friend, neither of them
+pretending much not to consent to appear silent. The Count’s few moments
+with them had both chilled Longmore and angered him, casting a shadow
+across a prospect which had somehow, just before, begun to open and
+almost to brighten. He watched his companion narrowly as they went, and
+wondered what she had last had to suffer. Her husband’s presence
+had checked her disposition to talk, though nothing betrayed she had
+recognised his making a point at her expense. Yet if matters were none
+the less plainly at a crisis between them he could but wonder vainly
+what it was on her part that prevented some practical protest or some
+rupture. What did she suspect?--how much did she know? To what was she
+resigned?--how much had she forgiven? How, above all, did she reconcile
+with knowledge, or with suspicion, that intense consideration she had
+just now all but assured him she entertained? “She has loved him once,”
+ Longmore said with a sinking of the heart, “and with her to love once is
+to commit herself for ever. Her clever husband thinks her too prim. What
+would a stupid poet call it?” He relapsed with aching impotence into the
+sense of her being somehow beyond him, unattainable, immeasurable by his
+own fretful logic. Suddenly he gave three passionate switches in the air
+with his cane which made Madame de Mauves look round. She could hardly
+have guessed their signifying that where ambition was so vain the next
+best thing to it was the very ardour of hopelessness.
+
+She found in her drawing-room the little elderly Frenchman, M. de
+Chalumeau, whom Longmore had observed a few days before on the terrace.
+On this occasion too Madame Clairin was entertaining him, but as her
+sister-in-law came in she surrendered her post and addressed herself to
+our hero. Longmore, at thirty, was still an ingenuous youth, and
+there was something in this lady’s large assured attack that fairly
+intimidated him. He was doubtless not as reassured as he ought to have
+been at finding he had not absolutely forfeited her favour by his want
+of resource during their last interview, and a suspicion of her being
+prepared to approach him on another line completed his distress.
+
+“So you’ve returned from Brussels by way of the forest?” she archly
+asked.
+
+“I’ve not been to Brussels. I returned yesterday from Paris by the only
+way--by the train.”
+
+Madame Clairin was infinitely struck. “I’ve never known a person at all
+to be so fond of Saint-Germain. They generally declare it’s horribly
+dull.”
+
+“That’s not very polite to you,” said Longmore, vexed at his lack of
+superior form and determined not to be abashed.
+
+“Ah what have I to do with it?” Madame Clairin brightly wailed. “I’m the
+dullest thing here. They’ve not had, other gentlemen, your success with
+my sister-in-law.”
+
+“It would have been very easy to have it. Madame de Mauves is kindness
+itself.”
+
+She swung open her great fan. “To her own countrymen!”
+
+Longmore remained silent; he hated the tone of this conversation.
+
+The speaker looked at him a little and then took in their hostess, to
+whom M. de Chalumeau was serving up another epigram, which the charming
+creature received with a droop of the head and eyes that strayed through
+the window. “Don’t pretend to tell me,” Madame Clairin suddenly exhaled,
+“that you’re not in love with that pretty woman.”
+
+“Allons donc!” cried Longmore in the most inspired French he had ever
+uttered. He rose the next minute and took a hasty farewell.
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+He allowed several days to pass without going back; it was of a sublime
+suitability to appear to regard his friend’s frankness during their
+last interview as a general invitation. The sacrifice cost him a great
+effort, for hopeless passions are exactly not the most patient; and he
+had moreover a constant fear that if, as he believed, deep within the
+circle round which he could only hover, the hour of supreme explanations
+had come, the magic of her magnanimity might convert M. de Mauves.
+Vicious men, it was abundantly recorded, had been so converted as to be
+acceptable to God, and the something divine in this lady’s composition
+would sanctify any means she should choose to employ. Her means, he kept
+repeating, were no business of his, and the essence of his admiration
+ought to be to allow her to do as she liked; but he felt as if he should
+turn away into a world out of which most of the joy had departed if she
+should like, after all, to see nothing more in his interest in her than
+might be repaid by mere current social coin.
+
+When at last he went back he found to his vexation that he was to run
+the gauntlet of Madame Clairin’s officious hospitality. It was one of
+the first mornings of perfect summer, and the drawing-room, through the
+open windows, was flooded with such a confusion of odours and bird-notes
+as might warrant the hope that Madame de Mauves would renew with him
+for an hour or two the exploration of the forest. Her sister-in-law,
+however, whose hair was not yet dressed, emerged like a brassy discord
+in a maze of melody. At the same moment the servant returned with his
+mistress’s regrets; she begged to be excused, she was indisposed and
+unable to see Mr. Longmore. The young man knew just how disappointed
+he looked and just what Madame Clairin thought of it, and this
+consciousness determined in him an attitude of almost aggressive
+frigidity. This was apparently what she desired. She wished to throw him
+off his balance and, if she was not mistaken, knew exactly how.
+
+“Put down your hat, Mr. Longmore,” she said, “and be polite for once.
+You were not at all polite the other day when I asked you that friendly
+question about the state of your heart.”
+
+“I HAVE no heart--to talk about,” he returned with as little grace.
+
+“As well say you’ve none at all. I advise you to cultivate a little
+eloquence; you may have use for it. That was not an idle question of
+mine; I don’t ask idle questions. For a couple of months now that you’ve
+been coming and going among us it seems to me you’ve had very few to
+answer of any sort.”
+
+“I’ve certainly been very well treated,” he still dryly allowed.
+
+His companion waited ever so little to bring out: “Have you never felt
+disposed to ask any?”
+
+Her look, her tone, were so charged with insidious meanings as to
+make him feel that even to understand her would savour of dishonest
+complicity. “What is it you have to tell me?” he cried with a flushed
+frown.
+
+Her own colour rose at the question. It’s rather hard, when you come
+bearing yourself very much as the sibyl when she came to the Roman king,
+to be treated as something worse than a vulgar gossip. “I might tell
+you, monsieur,” she returned, “that you’ve as bad a ton as any young man
+I ever met. Where have you lived--what are your ideas? A stupid one of
+my own--possibly!--has been to call your attention to a fact that it
+takes some delicacy to touch upon. You’ve noticed, I suppose, that my
+sister-in-law isn’t the happiest woman in the world.”
+
+“Oh!”--Longmore made short work of it.
+
+She seemed to measure his intelligence a little uncertainly. “You’ve
+formed, I suppose,” she nevertheless continued, “your conception of the
+grounds of her discontent?”
+
+“It hasn’t required much forming. The grounds--or at least a specimen or
+two of them--have simply stared me in the face.”
+
+Madame Clairin considered a moment with her eyes on him. “Yes--ces
+choses-la se voient. My brother, in a single word, has the deplorable
+habit of falling in love with other women. I don’t judge him; I don’t
+judge my sister-in-law. I only permit myself to say that in her position
+I would have managed otherwise. I’d either have kept my husband’s
+affection or I’d have frankly done without it. But my sister’s an odd
+compound; I don’t profess to understand her. Therefore it is, in a
+measure, that I appeal to you, her fellow countryman. Of course you’ll
+be surprised at my way of looking at the matter, and I admit that it’s
+a way in use only among people whose history--that of a race--has
+cultivated in them the sense for high political solutions.” She paused
+and Longmore wondered where the history of her race was going to lead
+her. But she clearly saw her course. “There has never been a galant
+homme among us, I fear, who has not given his wife, even when she was
+very charming, the right to be jealous. We know our history for ages
+back, and the fact’s established. It’s not a very edifying one if you
+like, but it’s something to have scandals with pedigrees--if you can’t
+have them with attenuations. Our men have been Frenchmen of France, and
+their wives--I may say it--have been of no meaner blood. You may see
+all their portraits at our poor charming old house--every one of them an
+‘injured’ beauty, but not one of them hanging her head. Not one of them
+ever had the bad taste to be jealous, and yet not one in a dozen ever
+consented to an indiscretion--allowed herself, I mean, to be talked
+about. Voila comme elles ont su s’arranger. How they did it--go and look
+at the dusky faded canvases and pastels and ask. They were dear brave
+women of wit. When they had a headache they put on a little rouge and
+came to supper as usual, and when they had a heart-ache they touched up
+that quarter with just such another brush. These are great traditions
+and charming precedents, I hold, and it doesn’t seem to me fair that a
+little American bourgeoise should come in and pretend to alter them--all
+to hang her modern photograph and her obstinate little air penche in the
+gallery of our shrewd great-grandmothers. She should fall into line, she
+should keep up the tone. When she married my brother I don’t suppose she
+took him for a member of a societe de bonnes oeuvres. I don’t say we’re
+right; who IS right? But we are as history has made us, and if any one’s
+to change it had better be our charming, but not accommodating, friend.”
+ Again Madame Clairin paused, again she opened and closed her great
+modern fan, which clattered like the screen of a shop-window. “Let her
+keep up the tone!” she prodigiously repeated.
+
+Longmore felt himself gape, but he gasped an “Ah!” to cover it. Madame
+Clairin’s dip into the family annals had apparently imparted an
+honest zeal to her indignation. “For a long time,” she continued, “my
+belle-soeur has been taking the attitude of an injured woman, affecting
+a disgust with the world and shutting herself up to read free-thinking
+books. I’ve never permitted myself, you may believe, the least
+observation on her conduct, but I can’t accept it as the last word
+either of taste or of tact. When a woman with her prettiness lets her
+husband stray away she deserves no small part of her fate. I don’t wish
+you to agree with me--on the contrary; but I call such a woman a pure
+noodle. She must have bored him to death. What has passed between them
+for many months needn’t concern us; what provocation my sister has
+had--monstrous, if you wish--what ennui my brother has suffered. It’s
+enough that a week ago, just after you had ostensibly gone to Brussels,
+something happened to produce an explosion. She found a letter in his
+pocket, a photograph, a trinket, que sais-je? At any rate there was a
+grand scene. I didn’t listen at the keyhole, and I don’t know what was
+said; but I’ve reason to believe that my poor brother was hauled over
+the coals as I fancy none of his ancestors have ever been--even by angry
+ladies who weren’t their wives.”
+
+Longmore had leaned forward in silent attention with his elbows on his
+knees, and now, impulsively, he dropped his face into his hands. “Ah
+poor poor woman!”
+
+“Voila!” said Madame Clairin. “You pity her.”
+
+“Pity her?” cried Longmore, looking up with ardent eyes and forgetting
+the spirit of the story to which he had been treated in the miserable
+facts. “Don’t you?”
+
+“A little. But I’m not acting sentimentally--I’m acting scientifically.
+We’ve always been capable of ideas. I want to arrange things; to see
+my brother free to do as he chooses; to see his wife contented. Do you
+understand me?”
+
+“Very well, I think,” the young man said. “You’re the most immoral
+person I’ve lately had the privilege of conversing with.”
+
+Madame Clairin took it calmly. “Possibly. When was ever a great
+peacemaker not immoral?”
+
+“Ah no,” Longmore protested. “You’re too superficial to be a great
+peacemaker. You don’t begin to know anything about Madame de Mauves.”
+
+She inclined her head to one side while her fine eyes kept her
+visitor in view; she mused a moment and then smiled as with a certain
+compassionate patience. “It’s not in my interest to contradict you.”
+
+“It would be in your interest to learn, madam” he resolutely returned,
+“what honest men most admire in a woman--and to recognise it when you
+see it.”
+
+She was wonderful--she waited a moment. “So you ARE in love!” she then
+effectively brought out.
+
+For a moment he thought of getting up, but he decided to stay. “I wonder
+if you’d understand me,” he said at last, “if I were to tell you that
+I have for Madame de Mauves the most devoted and most respectful
+friendship?”
+
+“You underrate my intelligence. But in that case you ought to exert your
+influence to put an end to these painful domestic scenes.”
+
+“Do you imagine she talks to me about her domestic scenes?” Longmore
+cried.
+
+His companion stared. “Then your friendship isn’t returned?” And as he
+but ambiguously threw up his hands, “Now, at least,” she added, “she’ll
+have something to tell you. I happen to know the upshot of my brother’s
+last interview with his wife.” Longmore rose to his feet as a protest
+against the indelicacy of the position into which he had been drawn; but
+all that made him tender made him curious, and she caught in his averted
+eyes an expression that prompted her to strike her blow. “My brother’s
+absurdly entangled with a certain person in Paris; of course he ought
+not to be, but he wouldn’t be my brother if he weren’t. It was this
+irregular passion that dictated his words. ‘Listen to me, madam,’
+he cried at last; ‘let us live like people who understand life! It’s
+unpleasant to be forced to say such things outright, but you’ve a way
+of bringing one down to the rudiments. I’m faithless, I’m heartless,
+I’m brutal, I’m everything horrible--it’s understood. Take your revenge,
+console yourself: you’re too charming a woman to have anything to
+complain of. Here’s a handsome young man sighing himself into a
+consumption for you. Listen to your poor compatriot and you’ll find that
+virtue’s none the less becoming for being good-natured. You’ll see
+that it’s not after all such a doleful world and that there’s even an
+advantage in having the most impudent of husbands.”’ Madame Clairin
+paused; Longmore had turned very pale. “You may believe it,” she
+amazingly pursued; “the speech took place in my presence; things were
+done in order. And now, monsieur”--this with a wondrous strained grimace
+which he was too troubled at the moment to appreciate, but which he
+remembered later with a kind of awe--“we count on you!”
+
+“Her husband said this to her face to face, as you say it to me now?” he
+asked after a silence.
+
+“Word for word and with the most perfect politeness.”
+
+“And Madame de Mauves--what did she say?”
+
+Madame Clairin smiled again. “To such a speech as that a woman
+says--nothing. She had been sitting with a piece of needlework, and I
+think she hadn’t seen Richard since their quarrel the day before. He
+came in with the gravity of an ambassador, and I’m sure that when he
+made his demande en mariage his manner wasn’t more respectful. He only
+wanted white gloves!” said Longmore’s friend. “My belle-soeur sat silent
+a few moments, drawing her stitches, and then without a word, without a
+glance, walked out of the room. It was just what she SHOULD have done!”
+
+“Yes,” the young man repeated, “it was just what she should have done.”
+
+“And I, left alone with my brother, do you know what I said?”
+
+Longmore shook his head.
+
+“Mauvals sujet!” he suggested.
+
+“‘You’ve done me the honour,’ I said, ‘to take this step in my presence.
+I don’t pretend to qualify it. You know what you’re about, and it’s your
+own affair. But you may confide in my discretion.’ Do you think he has
+had reason to complain of it?” She received no answer; her visitor had
+slowly averted himself; he passed his gloves mechanically round the
+band of his hat. “I hope,” she cried, “you’re not going to start for
+Brussels!”
+
+Plainly he was much disturbed, and Madame Clairin might congratulate
+herself on the success of her plea for old-fashioned manners. And yet
+there was something that left her more puzzled than satisfied in the
+colourless tone with which he answered, “No, I shall remain here for
+the present.” The processes of his mind were unsociably private, and she
+could have fancied for a moment that he was linked with their difficult
+friend in some monstrous conspiracy of asceticism.
+
+“Come this evening,” she nevertheless bravely resumed. “The rest will
+take care of itself. Meanwhile I shall take the liberty of telling my
+sister-in-law that I’ve repeated--in short, that I’ve put you au fait”
+
+He had a start but he controlled himself, speaking quietly enough. “Tell
+her what you please. Nothing you can tell her will affect her conduct.”
+
+“Voyons! Do you mean to tell me that a woman young, pretty, sentimental,
+neglected, wronged if you will--? I see you don’t believe it. Believe
+simply in your own opportunity!” she went on. “But for heaven’s sake, if
+it is to lead anywhere, don’t come back with that visage de croquemort.
+You look as if you were going to bury your heart--not to offer it to a
+pretty woman. You’re much better when you smile--you’re very nice then.
+Come, do yourself justice.”
+
+He remained a moment face to face with her, but his expression didn’t
+change. “I shall do myself justice,” he however after an instant made
+answer; and abruptly, with a bow, he took his departure.
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+He felt, when he found himself unobserved and outside, that he must
+plunge into violent action, walk fast and far and defer the opportunity
+for thought. He strode away into the forest, swinging his cane, throwing
+back his head, casting his eyes into verdurous vistas and following the
+road without a purpose. He felt immensely excited, but could have given
+no straight name to his agitation. It was a joy as all increase of
+freedom is joyous; something seemed to have been cleared out of his path
+and his destiny to have rounded a cape and brought him into sight of an
+open sea. But it was a pain in the degree in which his freedom somehow
+resolved itself into the need of despising all mankind with a single
+exception; and the fact that Madame de Mauves inhabited a planet
+contaminated by the presence of the baser multitude kept elation from
+seeming a pledge of ideal bliss.
+
+There she was, at any rate, and circumstances now forced them to be
+intimate. She had ceased to have what men call a secret for him, and
+this fact itself brought with it a sort of rapture. He had no prevision
+that he should “profit,” in the vulgar sense, by the extraordinary
+position into which they had been thrown; it might be but a cruel trick
+of destiny to make hope a harsher mockery and renunciation a keener
+suffering. But above all this rose the conviction that she could do
+nothing that wouldn’t quicken his attachment. It was this conviction
+that gross accident--all odious in itself--would force the beauty of her
+character into more perfect relief for him that made him stride along
+as if he were celebrating a spiritual feast. He rambled at hazard for a
+couple of hours, finding at last that he had left the forest behind him
+and had wandered into an unfamiliar region. It was a perfectly rural
+scene, and the still summer day gave it a charm for which its meagre
+elements but half accounted.
+
+He thought he had never seen anything so characteristically French;
+all the French novels seemed to have described it, all the French
+landscapists to have painted it. The fields and trees were of a cool
+metallic green; the grass looked as if it might stain his trousers and
+the foliage his hands. The clear light had a mild greyness, the sheen
+of silver, not of gold, was in the work-a-day sun. A great red-roofed
+high-stacked farmhouse, with whitewashed walls and a straggling yard,
+surveyed the highroad, on one side, from behind a transparent curtain of
+poplars. A narrow stream half-choked with emerald rushes and edged with
+grey aspens occupied the opposite quarter. The meadows rolled and
+sloped away gently to the low horizon, which was barely concealed by the
+continuous line of clipped and marshalled trees. The prospect was not
+rich, but had a frank homeliness that touched the young man’s fancy.
+It was full of light atmosphere and diffused clearness, and if it was
+prosaic it was somehow sociable.
+
+Longmore was disposed to walk further, and he advanced along the road
+beneath the poplars. In twenty minutes he came to a village which
+straggled away to the right, among orchards and potagers. On the left,
+at a stone’s throw from the road, stood a little pink-faced inn which
+reminded him that he had not breakfasted, having left home with a
+prevision of hospitality from Madame de Mauves. In the inn he found a
+brick-tiled parlour and a hostess in sabots and a white cap, whom, over
+the omelette she speedily served him--borrowing licence from the bottle
+of sound red wine that accompanied it--he assured she was a true artist.
+To reward his compliment she invited him to smoke his cigar in her
+little garden behind the house.
+
+Here he found a tonnelle and a view of tinted crops stretching down to
+the stream. The tonnelle was rather close, and he preferred to lounge on
+a bench against the pink wall, in the sun, which was not too hot. Here,
+as he rested and gazed and mused, he fell into a train of thought which,
+in an indefinable fashion, was a soft influence from the scene about
+him. His heart, which had been beating fast for the past three hours,
+gradually checked its pulses and left him looking at life with rather a
+more level gaze. The friendly tavern sounds coming out through the open
+windows, the sunny stillness of the yellowing grain which covered
+so much vigorous natural life, conveyed no strained nor high-pitched
+message, had little to say about renunciation--nothing at all about
+spiritual zeal. They communicated the sense of plain ripe nature,
+expressed the unperverted reality of things, declared that the common
+lot isn’t brilliantly amusing and that the part of wisdom is to grasp
+frankly at experience lest you miss it altogether. What reason there was
+for his beginning to wonder after this whether a deeply-wounded heart
+might be soothed and healed by such a scene, it would be difficult to
+explain; certain it was that as he sat there he dreamt, awake, of an
+unhappy woman who strolled by the slow-flowing stream before him and who
+pulled down the fruit-laden boughs in the orchards. He mused and mused,
+and at last found himself quite angry that he couldn’t somehow think
+worse of Madame de Mauves--or at any rate think otherwise. He could
+fairly claim that in the romantic way he asked very little of life--made
+modest demands on passion: why then should his only passion be born
+to ill fortune? Why should his first--his last--glimpse of positive
+happiness be so indissolubly linked with renunciation?
+
+It is perhaps because, like many spirits of the same stock, he had
+in his composition a lurking principle of sacrifice, sacrifice for
+sacrifice’s sake, to the authority of which he had ever paid due
+deference, that he now felt all the vehemence of rebellion. To renounce,
+to renounce again, to renounce for ever, was this all that youth and
+longing and ardour were meant for? Was experience to be muffled and
+mutilated like an indecent picture? Was a man to sit and deliberately
+condemn his future to be the blank memory of a regret rather than the
+long possession of a treasure? Sacrifice? The word was a trap for minds
+muddled by fear, an ignoble refuge of weakness. To insist now seemed not
+to dare, but simply to BE, to live on possible terms.
+
+His hostess came out to hang a moist cloth on the hedge, and, though her
+guest was sitting quietly enough, she might have imagined in his kindled
+eyes a flattering testimony to the quality of her wine. As she turned
+back into the house she was met by a young man of whom Longmore took
+note in spite of his high distraction. He was evidently a member of that
+jovial fraternity of artists whose very shabbiness has an affinity with
+the unestablished and unexpected in life--the element often gazed at
+with a certain wistfulness out of the curtained windows even of the
+highest respectability. Longmore was struck first with his looking like
+a very clever man and then with his looking like a contented one. The
+combination, as it was expressed in his face, might have arrested the
+attention of a less exasperated reasoner. He had a slouched hat and a
+yellow beard, a light easel under one arm, and an unfinished sketch in
+oils under the other. He stopped and stood talking for some moments to
+the landlady, while something pleasant played in his face. They were
+discussing the possibilities of dinner; the hostess enumerated some
+very savoury ones, and he nodded briskly, assenting to everything. It
+couldn’t be, Longmore thought, that he found such ideal ease in the
+prospect of lamb-chops and spinach and a croute aux fruits. When the
+dinner had been ordered he turned up his sketch, and the good woman fell
+to admiring and comparing, to picking up, off by the stream-side, the
+objects represented.
+
+Was it his work, Longmore wondered, that made him so happy? Was a
+strong talent the best thing in the world? The landlady went back to
+her kitchen, and the young painter stood, as if he were waiting for
+something, beside the gate which opened upon the path across the fields.
+Longmore sat brooding and asking himself if it weren’t probably better
+to cultivate the arts than to cultivate the passions. Before he had
+answered the question the painter had grown tired of waiting. He had
+picked up a pebble, tossed it lightly into an upper window and called
+familiarly “Claudine!” Claudine appeared; Longmore heard her at the
+window, bidding the young man cultivate patience. “But I’m losing
+my light,” he said; “I must have my shadows in the same place as
+yesterday.”
+
+“Go without me then,” Claudine answered; “I’ll join you in ten minutes.”
+ Her voice was fresh and young; it represented almost aggressively to
+Longmore that she was as pleased as her companion.
+
+“Don’t forget the Chenier,” cried the young man, who, turning away,
+passed out of the gate and followed the path across the fields until
+he disappeared among the trees by the side of the stream. Who might
+Claudine be? Longmore vaguely wondered; and was she as pretty as her
+voice? Before long he had a chance to satisfy himself; she came out of
+the house with her hat and parasol, prepared to follow her companion.
+She had on a pink muslin dress and a little white hat, and she was as
+pretty as suffices almost any Frenchwoman to be pleasing. She had a
+clear brown skin and a bright dark eye and a step that made walking as
+light a matter as being blown--and this even though she happened to be
+at the moment not a little over-weighted. Her hands were encumbered with
+various articles involved in her pursuit of her friend. In one arm she
+held her parasol and a large roll of needlework, and in the other a
+shawl and a heavy white umbrella, such as painters use for sketching.
+Meanwhile she was trying to thrust into her pocket a paper-covered
+volume which Longmore saw to be the poems of Andre Chenier, and in the
+effort dropping the large umbrella and marking this with a half-smiled
+exclamation of disgust. Longmore stepped forward and picked up the
+umbrella, and as she, protesting her gratitude, put out her hand to take
+it, he recognised her as too obliging to the young man who had preceded
+her.
+
+“You’ve too much to carry,” he said; “you must let me help you.”
+
+“You’re very good, monsieur,” she answered. “My husband always
+forgets something. He can do nothing without his umbrella. He is d’une
+etourderie--”
+
+“You must allow me to carry the umbrella,” Longmore risked; “there’s too
+much of it for a lady.”
+
+She assented, after many compliments to his politeness; and he walked
+by her side into the meadow. She went lightly and rapidly, picking her
+steps and glancing forward to catch a glimpse of her husband. She
+was graceful, she was charming, she had an air of decision and yet of
+accommodation, and it seemed to our friend that a young artist would
+work none the worse for having her seated at his side reading Chenier’s
+iambics. They were newly married, he supposed, and evidently their path
+of life had none of the mocking crookedness of some others. They asked
+little; but what need to ask more than such quiet summer days by a shady
+stream, with a comrade all amiability, to say nothing of art and books
+and a wide unmenaced horizon? To spend such a morning, to stroll back to
+dinner in the red-tiled parlour of the inn, to ramble away again as the
+sun got low--all this was a vision of delight which floated before him
+only to torture him with a sense of the impossible. All Frenchwomen were
+not coquettes, he noted as he kept pace with his companion. She uttered
+a word now and then for politeness’ sake, but she never looked at him
+and seemed not in the least to care that he was a well-favoured and
+well-dressed young man. She cared for nothing but the young artist in
+the shabby coat and the slouched hat, and for discovering where he had
+set up his easel.
+
+This was soon done. He was encamped under the trees, close to the
+stream, and, in the diffused green shade of the little wood, couldn’t
+have felt immediate need of his umbrella. He received a free rebuke,
+however, for forgetting it, and was informed of what he owed to
+Longmore’s complaisance. He was duly grateful; he thanked our hero
+warmly and offered him a seat on the grass. But Longmore felt himself
+a marplot and lingered only long enough to glance at the young man’s
+sketch and to see in it an easy rendering of the silvery stream and the
+vivid green rushes. The young wife had spread her shawl on the grass
+at the base of a tree and meant to seat herself when he had left them,
+meant to murmur Chenier’s verses to the music of the gurgling river.
+Longmore looked a while from one of these lucky persons to the other,
+barely stifled a sigh, bade them good-morning and took his departure. He
+knew neither where to go nor what to do; he seemed afloat on the sea of
+ineffectual longing. He strolled slowly back to the inn, where, in
+the doorway, he met the landlady returning from the butcher’s with the
+lambchops for the dinner of her lodgers.
+
+“Monsieur has made the acquaintance of the dame of our young painter,”
+ she said with a free smile--a smile too free for malicious meanings.
+“Monsieur has perhaps seen the young man’s picture. It appears that he’s
+d’une jolie force.”
+
+“His picture’s very charming,” said Longmore, “but his dame is more
+charming still.”
+
+“She’s a very nice little woman; but I pity her all the more.”
+
+“I don’t see why she’s to be pitied,” Longmore pleaded. “They seem a
+very happy couple.”
+
+The landlady gave a knowing nod. “Don’t trust to it, monsieur! Those
+artists--ca na pas de principes! From one day to another he can plant
+her there! I know them, allez. I’ve had them here very often; one year
+with one, another year with another.”
+
+Longmore was at first puzzled. Then, “You mean she’s not his wife?” he
+asked.
+
+She took it responsibly. “What shall I tell you? They’re not des hommes
+serieux, those gentlemen! They don’t engage for eternity. It’s none
+of my business, and I’ve no wish to speak ill of madame. She’s
+gentille--but gentille, and she loves her jeune homme to distraction.”
+
+“Who then is so distinguished a young woman?” asked Longmore. “What do
+you know about her?”
+
+“Nothing for certain; but it’s my belief that she’s better than he. I’ve
+even gone so far as to believe that she’s a lady--a vraie dame--and that
+she has given up a great many things for him. I do the best I can for
+them, but I don’t believe she has had all her life to put up with a
+dinner of two courses.” And she turned over her lamb-chops tenderly, as
+to say that though a good cook could imagine better things, yet if you
+could have but one course lamb-chops had much in their favour. “I shall
+do them with breadcrumbs. Voila les femmes, monsieur!”
+
+Longmore turned away with the feeling that women were indeed a
+measureless mystery, and that it was hard to say in which of their forms
+of perversity there was most merit. He walked back to Saint-Germain more
+slowly than he had come, with less philosophic resignation to any event
+and more of the urgent egotism of the passion pronounced by philosophers
+the supremely selfish one. Now and then the episode of the happy young
+painter and the charming woman who had given up a great many things for
+him rose vividly in his mind and seemed to mock his moral unrest like
+some obtrusive vision of unattainable bliss.
+
+The landlady’s gossip had cast no shadow on its brightness; her voice
+seemed that of the vulgar chorus of the uninitiated, which stands always
+ready with its gross prose rendering of the inspired passages of human
+action. Was it possible a man could take THAT from a woman--take all
+that lent lightness to that other woman’s footstep and grace to her
+surrender and not give her the absolute certainty of a devotion as
+unalterable as the process of the sun? Was it possible that so clear
+a harmony had the seeds of trouble, that the charm of so perfect union
+could be broken by anything but death? Longmore felt an immense desire
+to cry out a thousand times “No!” for it seemed to him at last that
+he was somehow only a graver equivalent of the young lover and that
+rustling Claudine was a lighter sketch of Madame de Mauves. The heat of
+the sun, as he walked along, became oppressive, and when he re-entered
+the forest he turned aside into the deepest shade he could find and
+stretched himself on the mossy ground at the foot of a great beech. He
+lay for a while staring up into the verdurous dusk overhead and trying
+mentally to see his friend at Saint-Germain hurry toward some quiet
+stream-side where HE waited, as he had seen that trusting creature hurry
+an hour before. It would be hard to say how well he succeeded; but the
+effort soothed rather than excited him, and as he had had a good deal
+both of moral and physical fatigue he sank at last into a quiet sleep.
+While he slept moreover he had a strange and vivid dream. He seemed
+to be in a wood, very much like the one on which his eyes had lately
+closed; but the wood was divided by the murmuring stream he had left an
+hour before. He was walking up and down, he thought, restlessly and in
+intense expectation of some momentous event. Suddenly, at a distance,
+through the trees, he saw a gleam of a woman’s dress, on which he
+hastened to meet her. As he advanced he recognised her, but he saw at
+the same time that she was on the other bank of the river. She seemed at
+first not to notice him, but when they had come to opposite places she
+stopped and looked at him very gravely and pityingly. She made him no
+sign that he must cross the stream, but he wished unutterably to stand
+by her side. He knew the water was deep, and it seemed to him he knew
+how he should have to breast it and how he feared that when he rose to
+the surface she would have disappeared. Nevertheless he was going to
+plunge when a boat turned into the current from above and came swiftly
+toward them, guided by an oarsman who was sitting so that they couldn’t
+see his face. He brought the boat to the bank where Longmore stood;
+the latter stepped in, and with a few strokes they touched the opposite
+shore. Longmore got out and, though he was sure he had crossed the
+stream, Madame de Mauves was not there. He turned with a kind of agony
+and saw that now she was on the other bank--the one he had left. She
+gave him a grave silent glance and walked away up the stream. The boat
+and the boatman resumed their course, but after going a short distance
+they stopped and the boatman turned back and looked at the still divided
+couple. Then Longmore recognised him--just as he had recognised him a
+few days before at the restaurant in the Bois de Boulogne.
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+He must have slept some time after he ceased dreaming for he had no
+immediate memory of this vision. It came back to him later, after he
+had roused himself and had walked nearly home. No great arrangement was
+needed to make it seem a striking allegory, and it haunted and oppressed
+him for the rest of the day. He took refuge, however, in his quickened
+conviction that the only sound policy in life is to grasp unsparingly
+at happiness; and it seemed no more than one of the vigorous measures
+dictated by such a policy to return that evening to Madame de Mauves.
+And yet when he had decided to do so and had carefully dressed himself
+he felt an irresistible nervous tremor which made it easier to linger
+at his open window, wondering with a strange mixture of dread and desire
+whether Madame Clairin had repeated to her sister-in-law what she had
+said to him. His presence now might be simply a gratuitous annoyance,
+and yet his absence might seem to imply that it was in the power of
+circumstances to make them ashamed to meet each other’s eyes. He sat
+a long time with his head in his hands, lost in a painful confusion of
+hopes and ambiguities. He felt at moments as if he could throttle Madame
+Clairin, and yet couldn’t help asking himself if it weren’t possible she
+had done him a service. It was late when he left the hotel, and as he
+entered the gate of the other house his heart beat so fast that he was
+sure his voice would show it.
+
+The servant ushered him into the drawing-room, which was empty and with
+the lamp burning low. But the long windows were open and their light
+curtains swaying in a soft warm wind, so that Longmore immediately
+stepped out upon the terrace. There he found Madame de Mauves alone,
+slowly pacing its length. She was dressed in white, very simply, and her
+hair was arranged not as she usually wore it, but in a single loose coil
+and as if she were unprepared for company. She stopped when she saw her
+friend, showed some surprise, uttered an exclamation and stood waiting
+for him to speak. He tried, with his eyes on her, to say something,
+but found no words. He knew it was awkward, it was offensive, to stand
+gazing at her; but he couldn’t say what was suitable and mightn’t say
+what he wished. Her face was indistinct in the dim light, but he felt
+her eyes fixed on him and wondered what they expressed. Did they warn
+him, did they plead, or did they confess to a sense of provocation? For
+an instant his head swam; he was sure it would make all things clear to
+stride forward and fold her in his arms. But a moment later he was still
+dumb there before her; he hadn’t moved; he knew she had spoken, but he
+hadn’t understood.
+
+“You were here this morning,” she continued; and now, slowly, the
+meaning of her words came to him. “I had a bad headache and had to shut
+myself up.” She spoke with her usual voice.
+
+Longmore mastered his agitation and answered her without betraying
+himself. “I hope you’re better now.”
+
+“Yes, thank you, I’m better--much better.”
+
+He waited again and she moved away to a chair and seated herself. After
+a pause he followed her and leaned closer to her, against the balustrade
+of the terrace. “I hoped you might have been able to come out for the
+morning into the forest. I went alone; it was a lovely day, and I took a
+long walk.”
+
+“It was a lovely day,” she said absently, and sat with her eyes lowered,
+slowly opening and closing her fan. Longmore, as he watched her, felt
+more and more assured her sister-in-law had seen her since her interview
+with him; that her attitude toward him was changed. It was this same
+something that hampered the desire with which he had come, or at least
+converted all his imagined freedom of speech about it to a final hush of
+wonder. No, certainly, he couldn’t clasp her to his arms now, any more
+than some antique worshipper could have clasped the marble statue in his
+temple. But Longmore’s statue spoke at last with a full human voice and
+even with a shade of human hesitation. She looked up, and it seemed to
+him her eyes shone through the dusk.
+
+“I’m very glad you came this evening--and I’ve a particular reason
+for being glad. I half-expected you, and yet I thought it possible you
+mightn’t come.”
+
+“As the case has been present to me,” Longmore answered, “it was
+impossible I shouldn’t come. I’ve spent every minute of the day in
+thinking of you.”
+
+She made no immediate reply, but continued to open and close her fan
+thoughtfully. At last, “I’ve something important to say to you,” she
+resumed with decision. “I want you to know to a certainty that I’ve
+a very high opinion of you.” Longmore gave an uneasy shift to his
+position. To what was she coming? But he said nothing, and she went on:
+“I take a great interest in you. There’s no reason why I shouldn’t
+say it. I feel a great friendship for you.” He began to laugh, all
+awkwardly--he hardly knew why, unless because this seemed the very irony
+of detachment. But she went on in her way: “You know, I suppose, that a
+great disappointment always implies a great confidence--a great hope.”
+
+“I’ve certainly hoped,” he said, “hoped strongly; but doubtless never
+rationally enough to have a right to bemoan my disappointment.”
+
+There was something troubled in her face that seemed all the while to
+burn clearer. “You do yourself injustice. I’ve such confidence in your
+fairness of mind that I should be greatly disappointed if I were to find
+it wanting.”
+
+“I really almost believe you’re amusing yourself at my expense,” the
+young man cried. “My fairness of mind? Of all the question-begging
+terms!” he laughed. “The only thing for one’s mind to be fair to is the
+thing one FEELS!”
+
+She rose to her feet and looked at him hard. His eyes by this time were
+accustomed to the imperfect light, and he could see that if she was
+urgent she was yet beseechingly kind. She shook her head impatiently and
+came near enough to lay her fan on his arm with a strong pressure. “If
+that were so it would be a weary world. I know enough, however, of your
+probable attitude. You needn’t try to express it. It’s enough that your
+sincerity gives me the right to ask a favour of you--to make an intense,
+a solemn request.”
+
+“Make it; I listen.”
+
+“DON’T DISAPPOINT ME. If you don’t understand me now you will to-morrow
+or very soon. When I said just now that I had a high opinion of you,
+you see I meant it very seriously,” she explained. “It wasn’t a vain
+compliment. I believe there’s no appeal one may make to your generosity
+that can remain long unanswered. If this were to happen--if I were to
+find you selfish where I thought you generous, narrow where I thought
+you large”--and she spoke slowly, her voice lingering with all emphasis
+on each of these words--“vulgar where I thought you rare, I should think
+worse of human nature. I should take it, I assure you, very hard indeed.
+I should say to myself in the dull days of the future: ‘There was ONE
+man who might have done so and so, and he too failed.’ But this shan’t
+be. You’ve made too good an impression on me not to make the very best.
+If you wish to please me for ever there’s a way.”
+
+She was standing close to him, with her dress touching him, her
+eyes fixed on his. As she went on her tone became, to his sense,
+extraordinary, and she offered the odd spectacle of a beautiful woman
+preaching reason with the most communicative and irresistible passion.
+Longmore was dazzled, but mystified and bewildered. The intention of
+her words was all remonstrance, refusal, dismissal, but her presence
+and effect there, so close, so urgent, so personal, a distracting
+contradiction of it. She had never been so lovely. In her white dress,
+with her pale face and deeply-lighted brow, she seemed the very spirit
+of the summer night. When she had ceased speaking she drew a long
+breath; he felt it on his cheek, and it stirred in his whole being
+a sudden perverse imagination. Were not her words, in their high
+impossible rigour, a mere challenge to his sincerity, a mere precaution
+of her pride, meant to throw into relief her almost ghostly beauty, and
+wasn’t this the only truth, the only law, the only thing to take account
+of?
+
+He closed his eyes and felt her watch him not without pain and
+perplexity herself. He looked at her again, met her own eyes and saw
+them fill with strange tears. Then this last sophistry of his great
+desire for her knew itself touched as a bubble is pricked; it died away
+with a stifled murmur, and her beauty, more and more radiant in the
+darkness, rose before him as a symbol of something vague which was yet
+more beautiful than itself. “I may understand you to-morrow,” he said,
+“but I don’t understand you now.”
+
+“And yet I took counsel with myself to-day and asked myself how I had
+best speak to you. On one side I might have refused to see you at all.”
+ Longmore made a violent movement, and she added: “In that case I should
+have written to you. I might see you, I thought, and simply say to you
+that there were excellent reasons why we should part, and that I begged
+this visit should be your last. This I inclined to do; what made me
+decide otherwise was--well, simply that I like you so. I said to myself
+that I should be glad to remember in future days, not that I had, in the
+horrible phrase, got rid of you, but that you had gone away out of the
+fulness of your own wisdom and the excellence of your own taste.”
+
+“Ah wisdom and taste!” the poor young man wailed.
+
+“I’m prepared, if necessary,” Madame de Mauves continued after a pause,
+“to fall back on my strict right. But, as I said before, I shall be
+greatly disappointed if I’m obliged to do that.”
+
+“When I listen to your horrible and unnatural lucidity,” Longmore
+answered, “I feel so angry, so merely sore and sick, that I wonder I
+don’t leave you without more words.”
+
+“If you should go away in anger this idea of mine about our parting
+would be but half-realised,” she returned with no drop in her ardour.
+“No, I don’t want to think of you as feeling a great pain, I don’t want
+even to think of you as making a great sacrifice. I want to think of
+you--”
+
+“As a stupid brute who has never existed, who never CAN exist!” he broke
+in. “A creature who could know you without loving you, who could leave
+you without for ever missing you!”
+
+She turned impatiently away and walked to the other end of the terrace.
+When she came back he saw that her impatience had grown sharp and almost
+hard. She stood before him again, looking at him from head to foot
+and without consideration now; so that as the effect of it he felt his
+assurance finally quite sink. This then she took from him, withholding
+in consequence something she had meant to say. She moved off afresh,
+walked to the other end of the terrace and stood there with her face to
+the garden. She assumed that he understood her, and slowly, slowly, half
+as the fruit of this mute pressure, he let everything go but the rage of
+a purpose somehow still to please her. She was giving him a chance to do
+gallantly what it seemed unworthy of both of them he should do meanly.
+She must have “liked” him indeed, as she said, to wish so to spare him,
+to go to the trouble of conceiving an ideal of conduct for him. With
+this sense of her tenderness still in her dreadful consistency, his
+spirit rose with a new flight and suddenly felt itself breathe clearer
+air. Her profession ceased to seem a mere bribe to his eagerness; it was
+charged with eagerness itself; it was a present reward and would somehow
+last. He moved rapidly toward her as with the sense of a gage that he
+might sublimely yet immediately enjoy.
+
+They were separated by two thirds of the length of the terrace, and he
+had to pass the drawing-room window. As he did so he started with an
+exclamation. Madame Clairin stood framed in the opening as if, though
+just arriving on the scene, she too were already aware of its interest.
+Conscious, apparently, that she might be suspected of having watched
+them she stepped forward with a smile and looked from one to the other.
+“Such a tete-a-tete as that one owes no apology for interrupting. One
+ought to come in for good manners.”
+
+Madame de Mauves turned to her, but answered nothing. She looked
+straight at Longmore, and her eyes shone with a lustre that struck him
+as divine. He was not exactly sure indeed what she meant them to say,
+but it translated itself to something that would do. “Call it what you
+will, what you’ve wanted to urge upon me is the thing this woman can
+best conceive. What I ask of you is something she can’t begin to!” They
+seemed somehow to beg him to suffer her to be triumphantly herself,
+and to intimate--yet this too all decently--how little that self was
+of Madame Clairin’s particular swelling measure. He felt an immense
+answering desire not to do anything then that might seem probable or
+prevu to this lady. He had laid his hat and stick on the parapet of the
+terrace. He took them up, offered his hand to Madame de Mauves with a
+simple good-night, bowed silently to Madame Clairin and found his way,
+with tingling ears, out of the place.
+
+
+
+
+IX
+
+He went home and, without lighting his candle, flung himself on his
+bed. But he got no sleep till morning; he lay hour after hour tossing,
+thinking, wondering; his mind had never been so active. It seemed to him
+his friend had laid on him in those last moments a heavy charge and
+had expressed herself almost as handsomely as if she had listened
+complacently to an assurance of his love. It was neither easy nor
+delightful thoroughly to understand her; but little by little her
+perfect meaning sank into his mind and soothed it with a sense of
+opportunity which somehow stifled his sense of loss. For, to begin with,
+she meant that she could love him in no degree or contingency, in no
+imaginable future. This was absolute--he knew he could no more alter
+it than he could pull down one of the constellations he lay gazing at
+through his open window. He wondered to what it was, in the background
+of her life, she had so dedicated herself. A conception of duty
+unquenchable to the end? A love that no outrage could stifle? “Great
+heaven!” he groaned; “is the world so rich in the purest pearls of
+passion that such tenderness as that can be wasted for ever--poured
+away without a sigh into bottomless darkness?” Had she, in spite of the
+detestable present, some precious memory that still kept the door of
+possibility open? Was she prepared to submit to everything and yet to
+believe? Was it strength, was it weakness, was it a vulgar fear, was it
+conviction, conscience, constancy?
+
+Longmore sank back with a sigh and an oppressive feeling that it was
+vain to guess at such a woman’s motives. He only felt that those of this
+one were buried deep in her soul and that they must be of the noblest,
+must contain nothing base. He had his hard impression that endless
+constancy was all her law--a constancy that still found a foothold among
+crumbling ruins. “She has loved once,” he said to himself as he rose
+and wandered to his window; “and that’s for ever. Yes, yes--if she loved
+again she’d be COMMON!” He stood for a long time looking out into the
+starlit silence of the town and forest and thinking of what life would
+have been if his constancy had met her own in earlier days. But life was
+this now, and he must live. It was living, really, to stand there with
+such a faith even in one’s self still flung over one by such hands.
+He was not to disappoint her, he was to justify a conception it had
+beguiled her weariness to form. His imagination embraced it; he threw
+back his head and seemed to be looking for his friend’s conception
+among the blinking mocking stars. But it came to him rather on the mild
+night-wind wandering in over the house-tops which covered the rest of
+so many heavy human hearts. What she asked he seemed to feel her ask not
+for her own sake--she feared nothing, she needed nothing--but for that
+of his own happiness and his own character. He must assent to destiny.
+Why else was he young and strong, intelligent and resolute? He mustn’t
+give it to her to reproach him with thinking she had had a moment’s
+attention for his love, give it to her to plead, to argue, to break off
+in bitterness. He must see everything from above, her indifference and
+his own ardour; he must prove his strength, must do the handsome thing,
+must decide that the handsome thing was to submit to the inevitable, to
+be supremely delicate, to spare her all pain, to stifle his passion,
+to ask no compensation, to depart without waiting and to try to believe
+that wisdom is its own reward. All this, neither more nor less, it was
+a matter of beautiful friendship with him for her to expect of him. And
+what should he himself gain by it? He should have pleased her! Well,
+he flung himself on his bed again, fell asleep at last and slept till
+morning.
+
+Before noon next day he had made up his mind to leave Saint-Germain at
+once. It seemed easiest to go without seeing her, and yet if he might
+ask for a grain of “compensation” this would be five minutes face to
+face with her. He passed a restless day. Wherever he went he saw her
+stand before him in the dusky halo of evening, saw her look at him with
+an air of still negation more intoxicating than the most passionate
+self-surrender. He must certainly go, and yet it was hideously hard. He
+compromised and went to Paris to spend the rest of the day. He strolled
+along the boulevard and paused sightlessly before the shops, sat a while
+in the Tuileries gardens and looked at the shabby unfortunates for whom
+this only was nature and summer; but simply felt afresh, as a result
+of it all, the dusty dreary lonely world to which Madame de Mauves had
+consigned him.
+
+In a sombre mood he made his way back to the centre of motion and sat
+down at a table before a cafe door, on the great plain of hot asphalt.
+Night arrived, the lamps were lighted, the tables near him found
+occupants, and Paris began to wear that evening grimace of hers that
+seems to tell, in the flare of plate glass and of theatre-doors, the
+muffled rumble of swift-rolling carriages, how this is no world for
+you unless you have your pockets lined and your delicacies perverted.
+Longmore, however, had neither scruples nor desires; he looked at
+the great preoccupied place for the first time with an easy sense
+of repaying its indifference. Before long a carriage drove up to the
+pavement directly in front of him and remained standing for several
+minutes without sign from its occupant. It was one of those neat plain
+coupes, drawn by a single powerful horse, in which the flaneur figures
+a pale handsome woman buried among silk cushions and yawning as she sees
+the gas-lamps glittering in the gutters. At last the door opened and out
+stepped Richard de Mauves. He stopped and leaned on the window for some
+time, talking in an excited manner to a person within. At last he gave a
+nod and the carriage rolled away. He stood swinging his cane and looking
+up and down the boulevard, with the air of a man fumbling, as one
+might say, the loose change of time. He turned toward the cafe and was
+apparently, for want of anything better worth his attention, about to
+seat himself at one of the tables when he noticed Longmore. He wavered
+an instant and then, without a shade of difference in his careless gait,
+advanced to the accompaniment of a thin recognition. It was the first
+time they had met since their encounter in the forest after Longmore’s
+false start for Brussels. Madame Clairin’s revelations, as he might have
+regarded them, had not made the Count especially present to his mind; he
+had had another call to meet than the call of disgust. But now, as M. de
+Mauves came toward him he felt abhorrence well up. He made out, however,
+for the first time, a cloud on this nobleman’s superior clearness, and a
+delight at finding the shoe somewhere at last pinching HIM, mingled with
+the resolve to be blank and unaccommodating, enabled him to meet the
+occasion with due promptness.
+
+M. de Mauves sat down, and the two men looked at each other across the
+table, exchanging formal remarks that did little to lend grace to their
+encounter. Longmore had no reason to suppose the Count knew of his
+sister’s various interventions. He was sure M. de Mauves cared very
+little about his opinions, and yet he had a sense of something grim in
+his own New York face which would have made him change colour if keener
+suspicion had helped it to be read there. M. de Mauves didn’t change
+colour, but he looked at his wife’s so oddly, so more than naturally
+(wouldn’t it be?) detached friend with an intentness that betrayed at
+once an irritating memory of the episode in the Bois de Boulogne and
+such vigilant curiosity as was natural to a gentleman who had entrusted
+his “honour” to another gentleman’s magnanimity--or to his artlessness.
+
+It might appear that these virtues shone out of our young man less
+engagingly or reassuringly than a few days before; the shadow at any
+rate fell darker across the brow of his critic, who turned away and
+frowned while lighting a cigar. The person in the coupe, he accordingly
+judged, whether or no the same person as the heroine of the episode of
+the Bois de Boulogne, was not a source of unalloyed delight. Longmore
+had dark blue eyes of admirable clarity, settled truth-telling eyes
+which had in his childhood always made his harshest taskmasters smile at
+his notion of a subterfuge. An observer watching the two men and knowing
+something of their relations would certainly have said that what he had
+at last both to recognise and to miss in those eyes must not a little
+have puzzled and tormented M. de Mauves. They took possession of him,
+they laid him out, they measured him in that state of flatness, they
+triumphed over him, they treated him as no pair of eyes had perhaps ever
+treated any member of his family before. The Count’s scheme had been to
+provide for a positive state of ease on the part of no one save himself,
+but here was Longmore already, if appearances perhaps not appreciable to
+the vulgar meant anything, primed as for some prospect of pleasure more
+than Parisian. Was this candid young barbarian but a faux bonhomme after
+all? He had never really quite satisfied his occasional host, but was he
+now, for a climax, to leave him almost gaping?
+
+M. de Mauves, as if hating to seem preoccupied, took up the evening
+paper to help himself to seem indifferent. As he glanced over it he
+threw off some perfunctory allusion to the crisis--the political--which
+enabled Longmore to reply with perfect veracity that, with other things
+to think about, he had had no attention to spare for it. And yet our
+hero was in truth far from secure against rueful reflexion. The Count’s
+ruffled state was a comfort so far as it pointed to the possibility
+that the lady in the coupe might be proving too many for him; but it
+ministered to no vindictive sweetness for Longmore so far as it should
+perhaps represent rising jealousy. It passed through his mind that
+jealousy is a passion with a double face and that on one of its sides it
+may sometimes almost look generous. It glimmered upon him odiously M. de
+Mauves might grow ashamed of his political compact with his wife, and
+he felt how far more tolerable it would be in future to think of him as
+always impertinent than to think of him as occasionally contrite.
+The two men pretended meanwhile for half an hour to outsit each other
+conveniently; and the end--at that rate--might have been distant had not
+the tension in some degree yielded to the arrival of a friend of M. de
+Mauves--a tall pale consumptive-looking dandy who filled the air with
+the odour of heliotrope. He looked up and down the boulevard wearily,
+examined the Count’s garments in some detail, then appeared to refer
+restlessly to his own, and at last announced resignedly that the Duchess
+was in town. M. de Mauves must come with him to call; she had abused him
+dreadfully a couple of evenings before--a sure sign she wanted to see
+him. “I depend on you,” said with an infantine drawl this specimen of
+an order Longmore felt he had never had occasion so intimately to
+appreciate, “to put her en train.”
+
+M. de Mauves resisted, he protested that he was d’une humeur
+massacrante; but at last he allowed himself to be drawn to his feet
+and stood looking awkwardly--awkwardly for M. de Mauves--at Longmore.
+“You’ll excuse me,” he appeared to find some difficulty in saying; “you
+too probably have occupation for the evening?”
+
+“None but to catch my train.” And our friend looked at his watch.
+
+“Ah you go back to Saint-Germain?”
+
+“In half an hour.”
+
+M. de Mauves seemed on the point of disengaging himself from his
+companion’s arm, which was locked in his own; but on the latter’s
+uttering some persuasive murmur he lifted his hat stiffly and turned
+away.
+
+Longmore the next day wandered off to the terrace to try and beguile
+the restlessness with which he waited for the evening; he wished to see
+Madame de Mauves for the last time at the hour of long shadows and
+pale reflected amber lights, as he had almost always seen her. Destiny,
+however, took no account of this humble plea for poetic justice; it
+was appointed him to meet her seated by the great walk under a tree and
+alone. The hour made the place almost empty; the day was warm, but as
+he took his place beside her a light breeze stirred the leafy edges of
+their broad circle of shadow. She looked at him almost with no pretence
+of not having believed herself already rid of him, and he at once told
+her that he should leave Saint-Germain that evening, but must first bid
+her farewell. Her face lighted a moment, he fancied, as he spoke; but
+she said nothing, only turning it off to far Paris which lay twinkling
+and flashing through hot exhalations. “I’ve a request to make of you,”
+ he added. “That you think of me as a man who has felt much and claimed
+little.”
+
+She drew a long breath which almost suggested pain. “I can’t think of
+you as unhappy. That’s impossible. You’ve a life to lead, you’ve duties,
+talents, inspirations, interests. I shall hear of your career. And
+then,” she pursued after a pause, though as if it had before this quite
+been settled between them, “one can’t be unhappy through having a better
+opinion of a friend instead of a worse.”
+
+For a moment he failed to understand her. “Do you mean that there can be
+varying degrees in my opinion of you?”
+
+She rose and pushed away her chair. “I mean,” she said quickly, “that
+it’s better to have done nothing in bitterness--nothing in passion.” And
+she began to walk.
+
+Longmore followed her without answering at first. But he took off his
+hat and with his pocket-handkerchief wiped his forehead. “Where shall
+you go? what shall you do?” he simply asked at last.
+
+“Do? I shall do as I’ve always done--except perhaps that I shall go for
+a while to my husband’s old home.”
+
+“I shall go to MY old one. I’ve done with Europe for the present,” the
+young man added.
+
+She glanced at him as he walked beside her, after he had spoken these
+words, and then bent her eyes for a long time on the ground. But
+suddenly, as if aware of her going too far she stopped and put out her
+hand. “Good-bye. May you have all the happiness you deserve!”
+
+He took her hand with his eyes on her, but something was at work in
+him that made it impossible to deal in the easy way with her touch.
+Something of infinite value was floating past him, and he had taken an
+oath, with which any such case interfered, not to raise a finger to stop
+it. It was borne by the strong current of the world’s great life and not
+of his own small one. Madame de Mauves disengaged herself, gathered in
+her long scarf and smiled at him almost as you would do at a child
+you should wish to encourage. Several moments later he was still there
+watching her leave him and leave him. When she was out of sight he shook
+himself, walked at once back to his hotel and, without waiting for the
+evening train, paid his bill and departed.
+
+Later in the day M. de Mauves came into his wife’s drawing-room, where
+she sat waiting to be summoned to dinner. He had dressed as he usually
+didn’t dress for dining at home. He walked up and down for some moments
+in silence, then rang the bell for a servant and went out into the hall
+to meet him. He ordered the carriage to take him to the station, paused
+a moment with his hand on the knob of the door, dismissed the
+servant angrily as the latter lingered observing him, re-entered the
+drawing-room, resumed his restless walk and at last stopped abruptly
+before his wife, who had taken up a book. “May I ask the favour,” he
+said with evident effort, in spite of a forced smile as of allusion to
+a large past exercise of the very best taste, “of having a question
+answered?”
+
+“It’s a favour I never refused,” she replied.
+
+“Very true. Do you expect this evening a visit from Mr. Longmore?”
+
+“Mr. Longmore,” said his wife, “has left Saint-Germain.” M. de Mauves
+waited, but his smile expired. “Mr. Longmore,” his wife continued, “has
+gone to America.”
+
+M. de Mauves took it--a rare thing for him--with confessed, if
+momentary, intellectual indigence. But he raised, as it were, the wind.
+“Has anything happened?” he asked, “Had he a sudden call?” But his
+question received no answer. At the same moment the servant threw open
+the door and announced dinner; Madame Clairin rustled in, rubbing her
+white hands, Madame de Mauves passed silently into the dining-room,
+but he remained outside--outside of more things, clearly, than his mere
+salle-a-manger. Before long he went forth to the terrace and continued
+his uneasy walk. At the end of a quarter of an hour the servant came to
+let him know that his carriage was at the door. “Send it away,” he said
+without hesitation. “I shan’t use it.” When the ladies had half-finished
+dinner he returned and joined them, with a formal apology to his wife
+for his inconsequence.
+
+The dishes were brought back, but he hardly tasted them; he drank on
+the other hand more wine than usual. There was little talk, scarcely a
+convivial sound save the occasional expressive appreciative “M-m-m!” of
+Madame Clairin over the succulence of some dish. Twice this lady saw
+her brother’s eyes, fixed on her own over his wineglass, put to her a
+question she knew she should have to irritate him later on by not being
+able to answer. She replied, for the present at least, by an elevation
+of the eyebrows that resembled even to her own humour the vain raising
+of an umbrella in anticipation of a storm. M. de Mauves was left alone
+to finish his wine; he sat over it for more than an hour and let the
+darkness gather about him. At last the servant came in with a letter and
+lighted a candle. The letter was a telegram, which M. de Mauves, when
+he had read it, burnt at the candle. After five minutes’ meditation
+he wrote a message on the back of a visiting-card and gave it to the
+servant to carry to the office. The man knew quite as much as his master
+suspected about the lady to whom the telegram was addressed; but its
+contents puzzled him; they consisted of the single word “Impossible.” As
+the evening passed without her brother’s reappearing in the drawing-room
+Madame Clairin came to him where he sat by his solitary candle. He
+took no notice of her presence for some time, but this affected her
+as unexpected indulgence. At last, however, he spoke with a particular
+harshness. “Ce jeune mufle has gone home at an hour’s notice. What the
+devil does it mean?”
+
+Madame Clairin now felt thankful for her umbrella. “It means that I’ve a
+sister-in-law whom I’ve not the honour to understand.”
+
+He said nothing more and silently allowed her, after a little, to
+depart. It had been her duty to provide him with an explanation, and he
+was disgusted with her blankness; but she was--if there was no more to
+come--getting off easily. When she had gone he went into the garden and
+walked up and down with his cigar. He saw his wife seated alone on the
+terrace, but remained below, wandering, turning, pausing, lingering.
+He remained a long time. It grew late and Madame de Mauves disappeared.
+Toward midnight he dropped upon a bench, tired, with a long vague
+exhalation of unrest. It was sinking into his spirit that he too didn’t
+understand Madame Clairin’s sister-in-law.
+
+Longmore was obliged to wait a week in London for a ship. It was very
+hot, and he went out one day to Richmond. In the garden of the hotel at
+which he dined he met his friend Mrs. Draper, who was staying there.
+She made eager enquiry about Madame de Mauves; but Longmore at first,
+as they sat looking out at the famous view of the Thames, parried her
+questions and confined himself to other topics. At last she said she was
+afraid he had something to conceal; whereupon, after a pause, he asked
+her if she remembered recommending him, in the letter she had addressed
+him at Saint-Germain, to draw the sadness from her friend’s smile. “The
+last I saw of her was her smile,” he said--“when I bade her good-bye.”
+
+“I remember urging you to ‘console’ her,” Mrs. Draper returned, “and I
+wondered afterwards whether--model of discretion as you are--I hadn’t
+cut you out work for which you wouldn’t thank me.”
+
+“She has her consolation in herself,” the young man said; “she needs
+none that any one else can offer her. That’s for troubles for which--be
+it more, be it less--our own folly has to answer. Madame de Mauves
+hasn’t a grain of folly left.”
+
+“Ah don’t say that!”--Mrs. Draper knowingly protested. “Just a little
+folly’s often very graceful.”
+
+Longmore rose to go--she somehow annoyed him. “Don’t talk of grace,” he
+said, “till you’ve measured her reason!”
+
+For two years after his return to America he heard nothing of Madame de
+Mauves. That he thought of her intently, constantly, I need hardly say;
+most people wondered why such a clever young man shouldn’t “devote”
+ himself to something; but to himself he seemed absorbingly occupied. He
+never wrote to her; he believed she wouldn’t have “liked” it. At last he
+heard that Mrs. Draper had come home and he immediately called on her.
+“Of course,” she said after the first greetings, “you’re dying for news
+of Madame de Mauves. Prepare yourself for something strange. I heard
+from her two or three times during the year after your seeing her. She
+left Saint-Germain and went to live in the country on some old property
+of her husband’s. She wrote me very kind little notes, but I felt
+somehow that--in spite of what you said about ‘consolation’--they were
+the notes of a wretched woman. The only advice I could have given her
+was to leave her scamp of a husband and come back to her own land and
+her own people. But this I didn’t feel free to do, and yet it made me
+so miserable not to be able to help her that I preferred to let our
+correspondence die a natural death. I had no news of her for a year.
+Last summer, however, I met at Vichy a clever young Frenchman whom
+I accidentally learned to be a friend of that charming sister of the
+Count’s, Madame Clairin. I lost no time in asking him what he knew
+about Madame de Mauves--a countrywoman of mine and an old friend. ‘I
+congratulate you on the friendship of such a person,’ he answered.
+‘That’s the terrible little woman who killed her husband.’ You may
+imagine I promptly asked for an explanation, and he told me--from his
+point of view--what he called the whole story. M. de Mauves had fait
+quelques folies which his wife had taken absurdly to heart. He had
+repented and asked her forgiveness, which she had inexorably refused.
+She was very pretty, and severity must have suited her style; for,
+whether or no her husband had been in love with her before, he fell
+madly in love with her now. He was the proudest man in France, but he
+had begged her on his knees to be re-admitted to favour. All in vain!
+She was stone, she was ice, she was outraged virtue. People noticed a
+great change in him; he gave up society, ceased to care for anything,
+looked shockingly. One fine day they discovered he had blown out his
+brains. My friend had the story of course from Madame Clairin.”
+
+Longmore was strongly moved, and his first impulse after he had
+recovered his composure was to return immediately to Europe. But several
+years have passed, and he still lingers at home. The truth is that,
+in the midst of all the ardent tenderness of his memory of Madame de
+Mauves, he has become conscious of a singular feeling--a feeling of
+wonder, of uncertainty, of awe.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Madame de Mauves, by Henry James
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