I had been through the culture-seeking stage, and knew my Henry James; so I could read between the lines of Sylvia’s experiences.  I figured her as a person walking on volcanic ground, not knowing her peril, but vaguely disquieted by a smell of sulphur in the air.  And once in a while a crack would open in the ground!  There was the Duke of Something in Rome, for example, a melancholy young man, with whom she had coquetted, as she did, in her merry fashion, with every man she met.  Being married, she had taken it for granted that she might be as winsome as she chose; but the young Italian had misunderstood the game, and had whispered words of serious import, which had so horrified Sylvia that she flew to her husband and told him the story—­begging him incidentally not to horse-whip the fellow.  In reply it had to be explained to her she had laid herself liable to the misadventure.  The ladies of the Italian aristocracy were severe and formal, and Sylvia had no right to expect an ardent young duke to understand her native wildness.

11.  Something of that sort was always happening—­something in each country to bewilder her afresh, and to make it necessary for her husband to remind her of the proprieties.  In France, a cousin of van Tuiver’s had married a marquis, and they had visited the chateau.  The family was Catholic, of the very oldest and strictest, and the brother-in-law, a prelate of high degree, had invited the guests to be shown through his cathedral.  “Imagine my bewilderment!” said Sylvia.  “I thought I was going to meet a church dignitary, grave and reverent; but here was a wit, a man of the world.  Such speeches you never heard!  I was ravished by the grandeur of the building, and I said:  ‘If I had seen this, I would have come to you to be married.’  ‘Madame is an American,’ he replied.  ‘Come the next time!’ When I objected that I was not a Catholic, he said:  ’Your beauty is its own religion!’ When I protested that he would be doing me too great an honour, ‘Madame,’ said he, ‘the honneur would be all to the church!’ And because I was shocked at all this, I was considered to be a provincial person!”

Then they had come to London, a dismal, damp city where you “never saw the sun, and when you did see it it looked like a poached egg”; where you had to learn to eat fish with the help of a knife, and where you might speak of bitches, but must never on any account speak of your stomach.  They went for a week-end to “Hazelhurst,” the home of the Dowager Duchess of Danbury, whose son van Tuiver, had entertained in America, and who, in the son’s absence, claimed the right to repay the debt.  The old lady sat at table with two fat poodle dogs in infants’ chairs, one on each side of her, feeding out of golden trays.  There was a visiting curate, a frightened little man at the other side of one poodle; in an effort to be at ease he offered the wheezing creature a bit of bread.  “Don’t feed my dogs!” snapped the old lady.  “I don’t allow anybody to feed my dogs!”