“I am afraid it’s the worst I can do,” Newman would say in answer to this.  “Kindly overlook the deficiency.”  He assured her that he, at least, would never scold her; she was perfectly satisfactory.  “If you only knew,” he said, “how exactly you are what I coveted!  And I am beginning to understand why I coveted it; the having it makes all the difference that I expected.  Never was a man so pleased with his good fortune.  You have been holding your head for a week past just as I wanted my wife to hold hers.  You say just the things I want her to say.  You walk about the room just as I want her to walk.  You have just the taste in dress that I want her to have.  In short, you come up to the mark, and, I can tell you, my mark was high.”

These observations seemed to make Madame de Cintre rather grave.  At last she said, “Depend upon it, I don’t come up to the mark; your mark is too high.  I am not all that you suppose; I am a much smaller affair.  She is a magnificent woman, your ideal.  Pray, how did she come to such perfection?”

“She was never anything else,” Newman said.

“I really believe,” Madame de Cintre went on, “that she is better than my own ideal.  Do you know that is a very handsome compliment?  Well, sir, I will make her my own!”

Mrs. Tristram came to see her dear Claire after Newman had announced his engagement, and she told our hero the next day that his good fortune was simply absurd.  “For the ridiculous part of it is,” she said, “that you are evidently going to be as happy as if you were marrying Miss Smith or Miss Thompson.  I call it a brilliant match for you, but you get brilliancy without paying any tax upon it.  Those things are usually a compromise, but here you have everything, and nothing crowds anything else out.  You will be brilliantly happy as well.”  Newman thanked her for her pleasant, encouraging way of saying things; no woman could encourage or discourage better.  Tristram’s way of saying things was different; he had been taken by his wife to call upon Madame de Cintre, and he gave an account of the expedition.

“You don’t catch me giving an opinion on your countess this time,” he said; “I put my foot in it once.  That’s a d—­d underhand thing to do, by the way—­coming round to sound a fellow upon the woman you are going to marry.  You deserve anything you get.  Then of course you rush and tell her, and she takes care to make it pleasant for the poor spiteful wretch the first time he calls.  I will do you the justice to say, however, that you don’t seem to have told Madame de Cintre; or if you have she’s uncommonly magnanimous.  She was very nice; she was tremendously polite.  She and Lizzie sat on the sofa, pressing each other’s hands and calling each other chere belle, and Madame de Cintre sent me with every third word a magnificent smile, as if to give me to understand that I too was a handsome dear.  She quite made up for past neglect, I assure you; she