One side of it was occupied by an open piano, surmounted by a jar full of white roses.  They perfumed the air; they seemed to me to exhale the pure aroma of Pickering’s devotion.  Buried in an arm-chair, the object of this devotion was reading the Revue des Deux Mondes.  The purpose of my visit was not to admire Madame Blumenthal on my own account, but to ascertain how far I might safely leave her to work her will upon my friend.  She had impugned my sincerity the evening of the opera, and I was careful on this occasion to abstain from compliments, and not to place her on her guard against my penetration.  It is needless to narrate our interview in detail; indeed, to tell the perfect truth, I was punished for my rash attempt to surprise her by a temporary eclipse of my own perspicacity.  She sat there so questioning, so perceptive, so genial, so generous, and so pretty withal, that I was quite ready at the end of half an hour to subscribe to the most comprehensive of Pickering’s rhapsodies.  She was certainly a wonderful woman.  I have never liked to linger, in memory, on that half-hour.  The result of it was to prove that there were many more things in the composition of a woman who, as Niedermeyer said, had lodged her imagination in the place of her heart than were dreamt of in my philosophy.  Yet, as I sat there stroking my hat and balancing the account between nature and art in my affable hostess, I felt like a very competent philosopher.  She had said she wished me to tell her everything about our friend, and she questioned me as to his family, his fortune, his antecedents, and his character.  All this was natural in a woman who had received a passionate declaration of love, and it was expressed with an air of charmed solicitude, a radiant confidence that there was really no mistake about his being a most distinguished young man, and that if I chose to be explicit, I might deepen her conviction to disinterested ecstasy, which might have almost provoked me to invent a good opinion, if I had not had one ready made.  I told her that she really knew Pickering better than I did, and that until we met at Homburg I had not seen him since he was a boy.

“But he talks to you freely,” she answered; “I know you are his confidant.  He has told me certainly a great many things, but I always feel as if he were keeping something back; as if he were holding something behind him, and showing me only one hand at once.  He seems often to be hovering on the edge of a secret.  I have had several friendships in my life—­thank Heaven! but I have had none more dear to me than this one.  Yet in the midst of it I have the painful sense of my friend being half afraid of me; of his thinking me terrible, strange, perhaps a trifle out of my wits.  Poor me!  If he only knew what a plain good soul I am, and how I only want to know him and befriend him!”