He performed this ceremony on the following day, when, by appointment, Christopher Newman went to dine with him.  Mr. and Mrs. Tristram lived behind one of those chalk-colored facades which decorate with their pompous sameness the broad avenues manufactured by Baron Haussmann in the neighborhood of the Arc de Triomphe.  Their apartment was rich in the modern conveniences, and Tristram lost no time in calling his visitor’s attention to their principal household treasures, the gas-lamps and the furnace-holes.  “Whenever you feel homesick,” he said, “you must come up here.  We’ll stick you down before a register, under a good big burner, and—­”

“And you will soon get over your homesickness,” said Mrs. Tristram.

Her husband stared; his wife often had a tone which he found inscrutable he could not tell for his life whether she was in jest or in earnest.  The truth is that circumstances had done much to cultivate in Mrs. Tristram a marked tendency to irony.  Her taste on many points differed from that of her husband, and though she made frequent concessions it must be confessed that her concessions were not always graceful.  They were founded upon a vague project she had of some day doing something very positive, something a trifle passionate.  What she meant to do she could by no means have told you; but meanwhile, nevertheless, she was buying a good conscience, by installments.

It should be added, without delay, to anticipate misconception, that her little scheme of independence did not definitely involve the assistance of another person, of the opposite sex; she was not saving up virtue to cover the expenses of a flirtation.  For this there were various reasons.  To begin with, she had a very plain face and she was entirely without illusions as to her appearance.  She had taken its measure to a hair’s breadth, she knew the worst and the best, she had accepted herself.  It had not been, indeed, without a struggle.  As a young girl she had spent hours with her back to her mirror, crying her eyes out; and later she had from desperation and bravado adopted the habit of proclaiming herself the most ill-favored of women, in order that she might—­as in common politeness was inevitable—­be contradicted and reassured.  It was since she had come to live in Europe that she had begun to take the matter philosophically.  Her observation, acutely exercised here, had suggested to her that a woman’s first duty is not to be beautiful, but to be pleasing, and she encountered so many women who pleased without beauty that she began to feel that she had discovered her mission.  She had once heard an enthusiastic musician, out of patience with a gifted bungler, declare that a fine voice is really an obstacle to singing properly; and it occurred to her that it might perhaps be equally true that a beautiful face is an obstacle to the acquisition of charming manners.  Mrs. Tristram, then, undertook to be exquisitely agreeable, and she brought to the