Page:The Novels and Tales of Henry James, Volume 2 (New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1907).djvu/508

 XXIV

was as yet two days off; but meanwhile, to beguile his impatience, Newman took his way to the Avenue de Messine and got what comfort he could in staring at the blank outer wall of Madame de Cintré's present abode. The street in question, as some travellers will remember, adjoins the Pare Monceau, which is one of the finest quarters of reconstructed Paris. It has an air of modern opulence and convenience that sounds a false note for any temple of sacrifice, and the impression made on his gloomily-irritated gaze by the fresh-looking, windowless expanse behind which the woman he loved was perhaps even then pledging herself to pass the rest of her days was less exasperating than he had feared. The place suggested a convent with the modern improvements—an asylum in which privacy, though unbroken, might be not quite identical with privation, and meditation, though monotonous, might be sufficiently placid. And yet he knew the case was other; only at present it was not a reality to him. It was too strange and too mocking to be real; it was like a page torn out of some superannuated unreadable book, with no context in his own experience.

On Sunday morning, at the hour Mrs. Tristram had indicated, he rang at the gate in the blank wall. It instantly opened and admitted him into a clean, cold-looking court, beyond which a dull, plain edifice 478