Page:The Novels and Tales of Henry James, Volume 2 (New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1907).djvu/534

THE AMERICAN to her with a grievance, but he found himself in an atmosphere in which apparently no cognisance was taken of such matters; an atmosphere into which the chill of discomfort had never penetrated and which seemed exclusively made up of mild, sweet, stale intellectual perfumes. The feeling with which he had watched Madame d'Outreville at the treacherous festival of the Bellegardes came back to him; she struck him as a wonderful old lady in some particularly "high" comedy, thoroughly well up in her part. He noticed before long that she asked him no question about their common friends; she made no allusion to the circumstances under which he had been presented to her. She neither feigned ignorance of a change in these circumstances nor pretended to condole with him upon it; but she smiled and discoursed and compared the tender-tinted wools of her tapestry as if the Bellegardes and their wickedness were not of this world. "She's fighting shy!" he said to himself; and, having drawn the inference, was curious to see, further, how, if this were a policy, she would carry it off. She did so in a masterly manner. There was not a gleam of disguised consciousness in the small, clear, demonstrative eyes which constituted her nearest claim to personal loveliness; there was not a symptom of apprehension he would trench on any ground she proposed to avoid. "Upon my word, she does it very well," he tacitly commented. "They all hold together bravely, and, whether any one else can trust them or not, they can certainly trust each other."

He fell at this juncture to admiring the Duchess for her fine manners. He felt, most accurately, that she 504