the humidity of Paris about the pretty complexions of the American ladies, about his impressions of France and his opinion of its female inhabitants.  All this was a brilliant monologue on the part of the duchess, who, like many of her country-women, was a person of an affirmative rather than an interrogative cast of mind, who made mots and put them herself into circulation, and who was apt to offer you a present of a convenient little opinion, neatly enveloped in the gilt paper of a happy Gallicism.  Newman had come to her with a grievance, but he found himself in an atmosphere in which apparently no cognizance was taken of grievance; an atmosphere into which the chill of discomfort had never penetrated, and which seemed exclusively made up of mild, sweet, stale intellectual perfumes.  The feeling with which he had watched Madame d’Outreville at the treacherous festival of the Bellegardes came back to him; she struck him as a wonderful old lady in a comedy, particularly well up in her part.  He observed before long that she asked him no questions about their common friends; she made no allusion to the circumstances under which he had been presented to her.  She neither feigned ignorance of a change in these circumstances nor pretended to condole with him upon it; but she smiled and discoursed and compared the tender-tinted wools of her tapestry, as if the Bellegardes and their wickedness were not of this world.  “She is fighting shy!” said Newman to himself; and, having made the observation, he was prompted to observe, farther, how the duchess would carry off her indifference.  She did so in a masterly manner.  There was not a gleam of disguised consciousness in those small, clear, demonstrative eyes which constituted her nearest claim to personal loveliness, there was not a symptom of apprehension that Newman would trench upon the ground she proposed to avoid.  “Upon my word, she does it very well,” he tacitly commented.  “They all hold together bravely, and, whether any one else can trust them or not, they can certainly trust each other.”

Newman, at this juncture, fell to admiring the duchess for her fine manners.  He felt, most accurately, that she was not a grain less urbane than she would have been if his marriage were still in prospect; but he felt also that she was not a particle more urbane.  He had come, so reasoned the duchess—­Heaven knew why he had come, after what had happened; and for the half hour, therefore, she would be charmante.  But she would never see him again.  Finding no ready-made opportunity to tell his story, Newman pondered these things more dispassionately than might have been expected; he stretched his legs, as usual, and even chuckled a little, appreciatively and noiselessly.  And then as the duchess went on relating a mot with which her mother had snubbed the great Napoleon, it occurred to Newman that her evasion of a chapter of French history more interesting to himself might possibly be the result of an extreme consideration for his