Page:The Novels and Tales of Henry James, Volume 2 (New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1907).djvu/565

THE AMERICAN she had unpacked the evening before. It was therefore as if she had looked at him on this, through bedimmed eyes, with the consciousness of a value, so far as she could see, quite extravagantly wasted. "Dear me, sir, I thought you said you were going to stay forever."

"Well, I guess I omitted a word. I meant I'm going to stay away for ever," he was obliged a little awkwardly to explain. And since his departure from Paris on the following day he has certainly not returned. The gilded apartments I have so often spoken of stand ready to receive him, but they serve only as a spacious setting for Mrs. Bread's solitary straightness, which wanders eternally from room to room, adjusting the tassels of the curtains, and keeps its wages, which are regularly brought in by a banker's clerk, in a great pink Sèvres vase on the drawing-room mantel-shelf.

Late in the evening Newman went to Mrs. Tristram's and found the more jovial member of the pair by the domestic fireside. "I'm glad to see you back in Paris," this gentleman declared, "for, you know, it's really the only place for a white man to live." Mr. Tristram made his friend welcome according to his own rosy light, and repaired in five minutes, with a free tongue, the too visible and too innocent deficiencies in Newman's acquaintance with current history. Then, having caused him to gape with strange information—all as to what had been going on in "notre monde à nous, you know"—Tristram got up to go and renew his budget at the club.

To this Newman replied that Mrs. Tristram was 535