Page:The Wheel of Time, Collaboration, Owen Wingrave (New York, Harper & Brothers, 1893).djvu/144

136 no province smaller nor more pedantically administered than the totality of things. I was reminded afresh too that he foresaw no striking salon-picture, no chic of execution nor romance of martyrdom, or at any rate devoted very little time to the consideration of such objects. He doubtless did scant justice to poor Vendemer's attitude, though he said to me of him, by-the-way, with his rosy deliberation: "He has good ideas—he has good ideas. The French mind has, for me, the taste of a very delightful bon-bon!" He only measured the angle of convergence, as he called it, of their two projections. He was, in short, not preoccupied with the personal gallantry of their experiment; he was preoccupied with its "æsthetic and harmonic basis."

It was without her daughter that Madame de Brindes received me, when I obeyed her summons, in her scrap of a quatrième in the Rue de Miromesnil.

"Ah, cher monsieur, how could you have permitted such a horror—how could you have given it the countenance of your roof, of your influence?" There were tears in