Page:The Novels and Tales of Henry James, Volume 2 (New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1907).djvu/213

THE AMERICAN a flower. The colouring in Madame de Cintré was the same, and the high delicacy of her brow and nose was hereditary. But her face was a larger and freer copy, and her mouth in especial a happy divergence from that conservative orifice, a small pair of lips at once plump and pinched, that suggested, when closed, that they could scarce open wider than to swallow a gooseberry or to emit an "Oh dear no!" and which had probably been thought to give the finishing touch to the aristocratic prettiness of the Lady Emmeline Atheling as represented, half a century before, in several Books of Beauty. Madame de Cintré's face had, to Newman's eye, a range of expression as delightfully vast as the wind-streaked, cloud-flecked distance on a Western prairie; but her mother's white, intense, respectable countenance, with its formal gaze and its circumscribed smile, figured a document signed and sealed, a thing of parchment, ink and ruled lines. "She's a woman of conventions and proprieties," he said to himself as he considered her; "her world's the world of things immutably decreed. But how she's at home in it and what a paradise she finds it! She walks about in it as if it were a blooming park, a Garden of Eden; and when she sees 'This is genteel' or 'This is improper' written on a milestone she stops as ecstatically as if she were listening to a nightingale or smelling a rose." Madame de Bellegarde wore a little black velvet hood tied under her chin and was wrapped in an old black cashmere shawl. "You're an American?" she went on presently. "I've seen several Americans." 183