Newman met young Madame de Bellegarde two or three times, always roaming about with graceful vagueness, as if in search of an unattainable ideal of amusement.  She always reminded him of a painted perfume-bottle with a crack in it; but he had grown to have a kindly feeling for her, based on the fact of her owing conjugal allegiance to Urbain de Bellegarde.  He pitied M. de Bellegarde’s wife, especially since she was a silly, thirstily-smiling little brunette, with a suggestion of an unregulated heart.  The small marquise sometimes looked at him with an intensity too marked not to be innocent, for coquetry is more finely shaded.  She apparently wanted to ask him something or tell him something; he wondered what it was.  But he was shy of giving her an opportunity, because, if her communication bore upon the aridity of her matrimonial lot, he was at a loss to see how he could help her.  He had a fancy, however, of her coming up to him some day and saying (after looking around behind her) with a little passionate hiss, “I know you detest my husband; let me have the pleasure of assuring you for once that you are right.  Pity a poor woman who is married to a clock-image in papier-mache!” Possessing, however, in default of a competent knowledge of the principles of etiquette, a very downright sense of the “meanness” of certain actions, it seemed to him to belong to his position to keep on his guard; he was not going to put it into the power of these people to say that in their house he had done anything unpleasant.  As it was, Madame de Bellegarde used to give him news of the dress she meant to wear at his wedding, and which had not yet, in her creative imagination, in spite of many interviews with the tailor, resolved itself into its composite totality.  “I told you pale blue bows on the sleeves, at the elbows,” she said.  “But to-day I don’t see my blue bows at all.  I don’t know what has become of them.  To-day I see pink—­a tender pink.  And then I pass through strange, dull phases in which neither blue nor pink says anything to me.  And yet I must have the bows.”

“Have them green or yellow,” said Newman.

“Malheureux!” the little marquise would cry.  “Green bows would break your marriage—­your children would be illegitimate!”

Madame de Cintre was calmly happy before the world, and Newman had the felicity of fancying that before him, when the world was absent, she was almost agitatedly happy.  She said very tender things.  “I take no pleasure in you.  You never give me a chance to scold you, to correct you.  I bargained for that, I expected to enjoy it.  But you won’t do anything dreadful; you are dismally inoffensive.  It is very stupid; there is no excitement for me; I might as well be marrying some one else.”