Something was going on, rapidly, in Madame de Cintre’s thoughts; she was weighing a question there, beneath Newman’s eyes, weighing it and deciding it.  “From the moment I don’t very respectfully beg you to leave the house and never return,” she said, “I listen to you, I seem to give you hope.  I have listened to you—­against my judgment.  It is because you are eloquent.  If I had been told this morning that I should consent to consider you as a possible husband, I should have thought my informant a little crazy.  I am listening to you, you see!” And she threw her hands out for a moment and let them drop with a gesture in which there was just the slightest expression of appealing weakness.

“Well, as far as saying goes, I have said everything,” said Newman.  “I believe in you, without restriction, and I think all the good of you that it is possible to think of a human creature.  I firmly believe that in marrying me you will be safe.  As I said just now,” he went on with a smile, “I have no bad ways.  I can do so much for you.  And if you are afraid that I am not what you have been accustomed to, not refined and delicate and punctilious, you may easily carry that too far.  I am delicate!  You shall see!”

Madame de Cintre walked some distance away, and paused before a great plant, an azalea, which was flourishing in a porcelain tub before her window.  She plucked off one of the flowers and, twisting it in her fingers, retraced her steps.  Then she sat down in silence, and her attitude seemed to be a consent that Newman should say more.

“Why should you say it is impossible you should marry?” he continued.  “The only thing that could make it really impossible would be your being already married.  Is it because you have been unhappy in marriage?  That is all the more reason!  Is it because your family exert a pressure upon you, interfere with you, annoy you?  That is still another reason; you ought to be perfectly free, and marriage will make you so.  I don’t say anything against your family—­understand that!” added Newman, with an eagerness which might have made a perspicacious observer smile.  “Whatever way you feel toward them is the right way, and anything that you should wish me to do to make myself agreeable to them I will do as well as I know how.  Depend upon that!”

Madame de Cintre rose again and came toward the fireplace, near which Newman was standing.  The expression of pain and embarrassment had passed out of her face, and it was illuminated with something which, this time at least, Newman need not have been perplexed whether to attribute to habit or to intention, to art or to nature.  She had the air of a woman who has stepped across the frontier of friendship and, looking around her, finds the region vast.  A certain checked and controlled exaltation seemed mingled with the usual level radiance of her glance.  “I will not refuse to see you again,” she said, “because much of what you have said has given me pleasure.  But I will see you only on this condition:  that you say nothing more in the same way for a long time.”