Page:The Novels and Tales of Henry James, Volume 2 (New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1907).djvu/337

THE AMERICAN XVI

next ten days were to be the happiest Newman had ever known. He saw Madame de Cintré every day, and never saw either her mother or the elder of his prospective brothers-in-law. The woman of his choice at last seemed to think it becoming to apologise for their never being present. "They're much taken up," she said, "with doing the honours of Paris to Lord Deepmere." Her gravity as she made this declaration was almost prodigious, and it even deepened as she added: "He's our seventh cousin, you know, and blood's thicker than water. And then he's so interesting!" And with this she strangely smiled.

He met young Madame de Bellegarde two or three times, always roaming about with graceful vagueness and as if in search of an unattainable ideal of diversion. She reminded him of some elegant painted phial, cracked and fragrantly exhaling; but he felt he owed indulgence to a lady who on her side owed submission to Urbain de Bellegarde. He pitied that nobleman's wife the more, also, that she was a silly, thirstily-smiling little brunette with a suggestion of the unregulated heart. The small Marquise sometimes looked at him with an intensity too marked not to be innocent, since vicious advances, he conceived, were usually much less direct. She apparently wanted to ask him something; he wondered what 307