Madame de Treymes

er gloves, stood in the hotel doorway looking out across the Ru

ordered spectacle of Paris: by its look of having been boldly and deliberately planned as a background for the enjoyment of life, instead of being for

of lilac made visible-to-day for the first time the sense of a personal stake in it all, of having to reckon individually with its effects and influences, kept Durham from an unrestrained yielding to the spell. Paris might still be-to the unimpl

Durham. She was the kind of woman who always presents herself to the mind's eye as completely equipped, as made up of exquisitely cared for and finely-related details; and that the heat o

tch up with life, in the way she dawdled over the last buttons in the dimness

e had been obliged to yield its place at the door, but was at the moment in the act of regaining it.

, she raised her eyes for

ross the Tuileries. I should lik

ng significance to her naturalness. Durham, indeed, was beginning to find that one of the charms of a sophisticated society is that it lends point and perspective to the slightest contact between the sexes. If, in the old unrestricted New York days, Fanny Frisbee, from a brown stone d

Rivoli, suffering her even, when they reached its farthest end, to direct him in silence up the steps to the terrace of the Feuillants. For, after all, the possibilities

The complicated beauty of this prospect, as they moved toward it between the symmetrically clipped limes of the lateral terrace, touched him anew through her nearness, as with the hint of some vast impersonal power, controlling and regulating her life in ways he could not guess, putting between himself and her the whole width of the ci

awaited the call of the national interrogati

ess of his joy flushed

aking tea with your

ote of disillusionment, which she met only b

ed them under the tree near which they had paused, saying reluctantly, as

, for the first time, a momentary inability to deal becomingly with the situation. "

t, in the language of any civilization, could that w

l Americans again!" she burst out, heaping

just a shade on the defensive: "If it's merely our Americanism yo

paused as if to assure herself that they were sufficiently isolated from the desultory

behind his eyes and in his

deas about Europe-their all regarding it as a great big innocent pleasure ground and shop for Americans; and your mother's missing the home-made bread and preferring the American a

ingled dining-room on a bare New England hill-top, rose pallidly between Durham and the verdant brightness of the Champs Elysees, and h

bring back golden rod and autumn leaves, and read nature books aloud on the piazza; and there is always one shy young man in flannels-only one-who has come to see the prettiest girl

till so good

and better o

hen why did you

ective light for the look of slightly shadowed wat

y husband would not go; and since-since our

you have made your life here. You could never give all this up!" He ma

uld never, now, be for more than a visit. I

which his whole mind was straining, and he began to feel a personal applicati

ent-about the bo

n full possession of her reasons: "It would have been much more difficult for me to obtai

f personal endeavour, to pause a moment on the question of "fairness." The personal claim reasserted it

too remote to have entered into her view of the f

it would be a

ers part late with their sons, and in that

ince he has only you,"

me came to present it. And he began to think that the time had now come; that their walk would not have thus resolved itself, without

te hope of happiness. But I felt, of course, even then, that the hope involved various difficulties-that we can't, as we might once have done, come together without any thought but for ourselves; and whatever your answer is to be, I want