Page:The Novels and Tales of Henry James, Volume 2 (New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1907).djvu/309

THE AMERICAN wait. Her mother exhaled a long heavy breath. "No, I can't say I had been sure of you. You're a very lucky gentleman," she added with a rather grand turn to their guest.

"Oh, I know that!" he answered. "I feel tremendously proud. I feel like crying it on the house tops—like stopping people in the street to tell them."

Madame de Bellegarde narrowed her lips. "Pray do nothing of the sort."

"Oh, the more people who know it the better," Newman roundly returned. "I have n't yet announced it here, but I cabled it this morning to America."

"'Cabled' it?" She spoke as if—what indeed well might be—she had never heard the expression.

"To New York, to Saint Louis and to San Francisco; those are the principal cities you know. Tomorrow I shall tell my friends here."

"Have you so many?" asked Madame de Bellegarde in a tone of which he perhaps but partly measured the impertinence.

"Enough to bring me a great many hand-shakes and congratulations. To say nothing," he added in a moment, "of those I shall receive from your own friends."

"Our own won't use the telegraph," said the Marquise as she took her departure.

M. de Bellegarde, whose wife, her imagination having apparently taken flight to the tailor's, was fluttering her silken wings in emulation, shook hands with Newman very pertinently and said with a more persuasive accent than the latter had ever heard him 279