Her husband (as I sat facing them both), with his thin bony nose, and a perfectly bloodless, narrow physiognomy clamped together as it were by short formal side-whiskers, had nothing of Sir Leicester Dedlock’s “grand air” and courtly solemnity.  He belonged to the haute bourgeoisie only, and was a banker, with whom a modest credit had been opened for my needs.  He was such an ardent—­no, such a frozen-up, mummified Royalist that he used in current conversation turns of speech contemporary, I should say, with the good Henri Quatre; and when talking of money matters reckoned not in francs, like the common, godless herd of post-Revolutionary Frenchmen, but in obsolete and forgotten ecus—­ecus of all money units in the world!—­as though Louis Quatorze were still promenading in royal splendour the gardens of Versailles, and Monsieur de Colbert busy with the direction of maritime affairs.  You must admit that in a banker of the nineteenth century it was a quaint idiosyncrasy.  Luckily in the counting-house (it occupied part of the ground floor of the Delestang town residence, in a silent, shady street) the accounts were kept in modern money, so that I never had any difficulty in making my wants known to the grave, low-voiced, decorous, Legitimist (I suppose) clerks, sitting in the perpetual gloom of heavily barred windows behind the sombre, ancient counters, beneath lofty ceilings with heavily moulded cornices.  I always felt on going out as though I had been in the temple of some very dignified but completely temporal religion.  And it was generally on these occasions that under the great carriage gateway Lady Ded—­ I mean Madame Delestang, catching sight of my raised hat, would beckon me with an amiable imperiousness to the side of the carriage, and suggest with an air of amused nonchalance, “Venez donc faire un tour avec nous,” to which the husband would add an encouraging “C’est ca.  Allons, montez, jeune homme.”  He questioned me sometimes, significantly but with perfect tact and delicacy, as to the way I employed my time, and never failed to express the hope that I wrote regularly to my “honoured uncle.”  I made no secret of the way I employed my time, and I rather fancy that my artless tales of the pilots and so on entertained Madame Delestang, so far as that ineffable woman could be entertained by the prattle of a youngster very full of his new experience amongst strange men and strange sensations.  She expressed no opinions, and talked to me very little; yet her portrait hangs in the gallery of my intimate memories, fixed there by a short and fleeting episode.  One day, after putting me down at the corner of a street, she offered me her hand, and detained me by a slight pressure, for a moment.  While the husband sat motionless and looking straight before him, she leaned forward in the carriage to say, with just a shade of warning in her leisurely tone:  “Il faut, cependant, faire attention a ne pas gater sa vie.”  I had never seen her face so close to mine before.  She made my heart beat, and caused me to remain thoughtful for a whole evening.  Certainly one must, after all, take care not to spoil one’s life.  But she did not know—­nobody could know—­how impossible that danger seemed to me.