Page:The Novels and Tales of Henry James, Volume 2 (New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1907).djvu/176

THE AMERICAN that they had sat long over their dinner. On rising from it the young man proposed that, to help them through the rest of the evening, they should go and see Madame Dandelard. Madame Dandelard was a little Italian lady married to a Frenchman who had proved a rake and a brute and the torment of her life. Her husband had spent all her money and then, lacking further means for alien joys, had taken, in his more intimate hours, to beating her. She had a blue spot somewhere which she showed to several persons, including the said Valentine. She had obtained a legal separation, collected the scraps of her fortune, which were meagre, and come to live in Paris, where she was staying at an hôtel garni. She was always looking for an apartment and visiting, with a hundred earnest questions and measurements, those of other people. She was very pretty and childlike and made very extraordinary remarks. Valentin enjoyed her acquaintance, and the source of his interest in her was, according to his declaration, an anxious curiosity as to what would become of her. "She's poor, she's pretty and she's silly," he said; "it seems to me she can go only one way. It's a pity, but it can't be helped. I 'll give her six months. She has nothing to fear from me, but I'm watching the process. It's merely a question of the how and the when and the where. Yes, I know what you're going to say; this horrible Paris hardens one's heart. But it quickens one's wits, and it ends by teaching one a refinement of observation. To see this little woman's little drama play itself out is now for me a pleasure of the mind." 146