Newman felt that taking her measure was not easy; she was a formidable, inscrutable little woman.  She resembled her daughter, and yet she was utterly unlike her.  The coloring in Madame de Cintre was the same, and the high delicacy of her brow and nose was hereditary.  But her face was a larger and freer copy, and her mouth in especial a happy divergence from that conservative orifice, a little pair of lips at once plump and pinched, that looked, when closed, as if they could not open wider than to swallow a gooseberry or to emit an “Oh, dear, no!” which probably had been thought to give the finishing touch to the aristocratic prettiness of the Lady Emmeline Atheling as represented, forty years before, in several Books of Beauty.  Madame de Cintre’s face had, to Newman’s eye, a range of expression as delightfully vast as the wind-streaked, cloud-flecked distance on a Western prairie.  But her mother’s white, intense, respectable countenance, with its formal gaze, and its circumscribed smile, suggested a document signed and sealed; a thing of parchment, ink, and ruled lines.  “She is a woman of conventions and proprieties,” he said to himself as he looked at her; “her world is the world of things immutably decreed.  But how she is at home in it, and what a paradise she finds it.  She walks about in it as if it were a blooming park, a Garden of Eden; and when she sees ‘This is genteel,’ or ‘This is improper,’ written on a mile-stone she stops ecstatically, as if she were listening to a nightingale or smelling a rose.”  Madame de Bellegarde wore a little black velvet hood tied under her chin, and she was wrapped in an old black cashmere shawl.

“You are an American?” she said presently.  “I have seen several Americans.”

“There are several in Paris,” said Newman jocosely.

“Oh, really?” said Madame de Bellegarde.  “It was in England I saw these, or somewhere else; not in Paris.  I think it must have been in the Pyrenees, many years ago.  I am told your ladies are very pretty.  One of these ladies was very pretty! such a wonderful complexion!  She presented me a note of introduction from some one—­I forgot whom—­and she sent with it a note of her own.  I kept her letter a long time afterwards, it was so strangely expressed.  I used to know some of the phrases by heart.  But I have forgotten them now, it is so many years ago.  Since then I have seen no more Americans.  I think my daughter-in-law has; she is a great gad-about, she sees every one.”

At this the younger lady came rustling forward, pinching in a very slender waist, and casting idly preoccupied glances over the front of her dress, which was apparently designed for a ball.  She was, in a singular way, at once ugly and pretty; she had protuberant eyes, and lips strangely red.  She reminded Newman of his friend, Mademoiselle Nioche; this was what that much-obstructed young lady would have liked to be.  Valentin de Bellegarde walked behind her at a distance, hopping about to keep off the far-spreading train of her dress.