To which Nannie promptly if obscurely retorted:  “Ah, but we couldn’t and she could!”

IV

Madame de Treymes’ friendly observation of her sister-in-law’s visitors resulted in no expression on her part of a desire to renew her study of them.  To all appearances, she passed out of their lives when Madame de Malrive’s door closed on her; and Durham felt that the arduous task of making her acquaintance was still to be begun.

He felt also, more than ever, the necessity of attempting it; and in his determination to lose no time, and his perplexity how to set most speedily about the business, he bethought himself of applying to his cousin Mrs. Boykin.

Mrs. Elmer Boykin was a small plump woman, to whose vague prettiness the lines of middle-age had given no meaning:  as though whatever had happened to her had merely added to the sum total of her inexperience.  After a Parisian residence of twenty-five years, spent in a state of feverish servitude to the great artists of the rue de la Paix, her dress and hair still retained a certain rigidity in keeping with the directness of her gaze and the unmodulated candour of her voice.  Her very drawing-room had the hard bright atmosphere of her native skies, and one felt that she was still true at heart to the national ideals in electric lighting and plumbing.

She and her husband had left America owing to the impossibility of living there with the finish and decorum which the Boykin standard demanded; but in the isolation of their exile they had created about them a kind of phantom America, where the national prejudices continued to flourish unchecked by the national progressiveness:  a little world sparsely peopled by compatriots in the same attitude of chronic opposition toward a society chronically unaware of them.  In this uncontaminated air Mr. and Mrs. Boykin had preserved the purity of simpler conditions, and Elmer Boykin, returning rakishly from a Sunday’s racing at Chantilly, betrayed, under his “knowing” coat and the racing-glasses slung ostentatiously across his shoulder, the unmistakeable cut of the American business man coming “up town” after a long day in the office.

It was a part of the Boykins’ uncomfortable but determined attitude—­and perhaps a last expression of their latent patriotism—­to live in active disapproval of the world about them, fixing in memory with little stabs of reprobation innumerable instances of what the abominable foreigner was doing; so that they reminded Durham of persons peacefully following the course of a horrible war by pricking red pins in a map.  To Mrs. Durham, with her gentle tourist’s view of the European continent, as a vast Museum in which the human multitudes simply furnished the element of costume, the Boykins seemed abysmally instructed, and darkly expert in forbidden things; and her son, without sharing her simple faith in their omniscience, credited them with an ample supply of the kind of information of which he was in search.