Page:The Novels and Tales of Henry James, Volume 2 (New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1907).djvu/338

THE AMERICAN it might be. But he was shy of giving her an opportunity, because, if her communication bore upon the aridity of her matrimonial lot, he was at a loss to see how he could help her. He had a fancy, however, of her coming up to him some day and saying (after looking round behind her) with a little passionate hiss: "I know you detest my husband; let me have the pleasure of promising you that you're right. Pity a poor woman who's married to a clock-image in papier-mâche!" Possessing, at any rate, in default of a competent knowledge of the principles of etiquette, a very downright sense of the "meanness" of certain actions, it seemed to him to belong to his proper position to keep on his guard; he was not going to put it into the power of these people to say he had done in their house anything not absolutely straight. As it was, Madame de Bellegarde used to give him news of the dress she meant to wear at his wedding, and which had not yet, in her creative imagination, in spite of many interviews with the tailor, resolved itself into its composite totality. "I told you pale blue bows on the sleeves, at the elbow," she would say. "But to-day I don't see my blue bows at all. I don't know what has become of them. To-day I see pink—a tender sort of cuisse de nymphe pink. And then I pass through strange desolate phases in which neither blue nor pink says anything to me. And yet I must have the bows."

"Have them green or yellow," Newman sometimes suggested.

"Malheureux!" the little Marquise would then piercingly cry. "I hope you're not going to pretend 308