I marvelled at the villainy of my tone as I spoke, but it was only assumed.

“I don’t think she has done badly for herself, so far,” I forced myself to say.  “I suppose you know that she began life by herding the village goats.”

In the course of that phrase I noticed her wince just the least bit.  Oh, yes, she winced; but at the end of it she smiled easily.

“No, I didn’t know.  So she told you her story!  Oh, well, I suppose you are very good friends.  A goatherd—­really?  In the fairy tale I believe the girl that marries the prince is—­what is it?—­a gardeuse d’oies.  And what a thing to drag out against a woman.  One might just as soon reproach any of them for coming unclothed into the world.  They all do, you know.  And then they become—­what you will discover when you have lived longer, Monsieur George—­for the most part futile creatures, without any sense of truth and beauty, drudges of all sorts, or else dolls to dress.  In a word—­ordinary.”

The implication of scorn in her tranquil manner was immense.  It seemed to condemn all those that were not born in the Blunt connection.  It was the perfect pride of Republican aristocracy, which has no gradations and knows no limit, and, as if created by the grace of God, thinks it ennobles everything it touches:  people, ideas, even passing tastes!

“How many of them,” pursued Mrs. Blunt, “have had the good fortune, the leisure to develop their intelligence and their beauty in aesthetic conditions as this charming woman had?  Not one in a million.  Perhaps not one in an age.”

“The heiress of Henry Allegre,” I murmured.

“Precisely.  But John wouldn’t be marrying the heiress of Henry Allegre.”

It was the first time that the frank word, the clear idea, came into the conversation and it made me feel ill with a sort of enraged faintness.

“No,” I said.  “It would be Mme. de Lastaola then.”

“Mme. la Comtesse de Lastaola as soon as she likes after the success of this war.”

“And you believe in its success?”

“Do you?”

“Not for a moment,” I declared, and was surprised to see her look pleased.

She was an aristocrat to the tips of her fingers; she really didn’t care for anybody.  She had passed through the Empire, she had lived through a siege, had rubbed shoulders with the Commune, had seen everything, no doubt, of what men are capable in the pursuit of their desires or in the extremity of their distress, for love, for money, and even for honour; and in her precarious connection with the very highest spheres she had kept her own honourability unscathed while she had lost all her prejudices.  She was above all that.  Perhaps “the world” was the only thing that could have the slightest checking influence; but when I ventured to say something about the view it might take of such an alliance she looked at me for a moment with visible surprise.