Page:The Novels and Tales of Henry James, Volume 2 (New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1907).djvu/83

 "Oh, she's a widow then?"

"Are you already afraid? She was married at eighteen, by her parents, in the French fashion, to a man with advantages of fortune, but objectionable, detestable, on other grounds, and many years too old. He had, however, the discretion to die a couple of years afterwards, and she's now twenty-eight."

"So she's French?"

"French by her father, English by her mother. She's really more English than French, and she speaks English as well as you or I—or rather much better. She belongs, as they say here, to the very top of the basket. Her family, on each side, is of fabulous antiquity; her mother's the daughter of an English Catholic peer. Her father's dead, and since her widowhood she has lived with her mother and a married brother. There's another brother, younger, who I believe is rather amusing but quite impossible. They have an old hôtel in the Rue de l'Université, but their fortune's small and they make, for economy's sake, a common household. When I was a girl of less than fifteen I was put into a convent here for my education while my father made the tour of Europe. It was a fatuous thing to do with me, but it had the advantage that it made me acquainted with Claire de Bellegarde. She was younger than I, yet we became fast friends. I took a tremendous fancy to her, and she returned my adoration so far as she could. They kept such a tight rein on her that she could do very little, and when I left the convent she had to give me up. I was not of her monde; I'm not now either, but we sometimes meet. They're terrible 53