Page:The Tattooed Countess (1924).pdf/126

 knew, quite destroyed any possibility of future intercourse with her. He had liked her in his fashion; she had been useful to him; had given him a great deal in their impersonal discussions, but he knew now that this was the end. Miss Colman was not Clara Barnes. She would always be dreading a complete communion and always desiring it; she might even want to marry him. On the plane of emotion to which her desire might conceivably carry her, future communication with her would be decidedly unpleasant.

In these hours, after he had considered Lennie, his thought invariably drifted forward to the Countess Nattatorrini, whose name associated itself quite naturally in his imagination with all that he felt about the life of Paris. She might even, he reasoned, have met Alphonse Daudet or Guy de Maupassant. She had, he assured himself, seen all the openings in the Paris theatres in the past two decades. What excitement conversation about these matters might provoke! Somehow, however, the longed-for meeting had not come about. His mother had met her several times, but his mother gave few entertainments, and she could scarcely presume—Lou Poore was not one of her intimate friends—to open her house suddenly to this visiting guest. It was, he was beginning to believe more and more, through Lennie Colman that he was ironically destined to be introduced to the Countess Nattatorrini.