“Make it two thousand, and she’ll ask you to tea,” Mr. Boykin scathingly added.

V

In the monumental drawing-room of the Hotel de Malrive—­it had been a surprise to the American to read the name of the house emblazoned on black marble over its still more monumental gateway—­Durham found himself surrounded by a buzz of feminine tea-sipping oddly out of keeping with the wigged and cuirassed portraits frowning high on the walls, the majestic attitude of the furniture, the rigidity of great gilt consoles drawn up like lords-in-waiting against the tarnished panels.

It was the old Marquise de Malrive’s “day,” and Madame de Treymes, who lived with her mother, had admitted Durham to the heart of the enemy’s country by inviting him, after his prodigal disbursements at the charity bazaar, to come in to tea on a Thursday.  Whether, in thus fulfilling Mr. Boykin’s prediction, she had been aware of Durham’s purpose, and had her own reasons for falling in with it; or whether she simply wished to reward his lavishness at the fair, and permit herself another glimpse of an American so picturesquely embodying the type familiar to French fiction—­on these points Durham was still in doubt.

Meanwhile, Madame de Treymes being engaged with a venerable Duchess in a black shawl—­all the older ladies present had the sloping shoulders of a generation of shawl-wearers—­her American visitor, left in the isolation of his unimportance, was using it as a shelter for a rapid survey of the scene.

He had begun his study of Fanny de Malrive’s situation without any real understanding of her fears.  He knew the repugnance to divorce existing in the French Catholic world, but since the French laws sanctioned it, and in a case so flagrant as his injured friend’s, would inevitably accord it with the least possible delay and exposure, he could not take seriously any risk of opposition on the part of the husband’s family.  Madame de Malrive had not become a Catholic, and since her religious scruples could not be played on, the only weapon remaining to the enemy—­the threat of fighting the divorce—­was one they could not wield without self-injury.  Certainly, if the chief object were to avoid scandal, common sense must counsel Monsieur de Malrive and his friends not to give the courts an opportunity of exploring his past; and since the echo of such explorations, and their ultimate transmission to her son, were what Madame de Malrive most dreaded, the opposing parties seemed to have a common ground for agreement, and Durham could not but regard his friend’s fears as the result of over-taxed sensibilities.  All this had seemed evident enough to him as he entered the austere portals of the Hotel de Malrive and passed, between the faded liveries of old family servants, to the presence of the dreaded dowager above.  But he had not been ten minutes in that presence before he had arrived at a faint intuition of what poor Fanny