a cent), how little he was of metal without alloy: this had come up
for her, remarkably, but afterward--come up for her as she looked
back. Then she had drawn her conclusion, which was one of the many
that Basil French had made her draw. It was a queer service Basil was
going to have rendered her, this having made everything she had ever
done impossible, if he wasn't going to give her a new chance. If he
was it was doubtless right enough. On the other hand, Murray might
have improved, if such a quantity of alloy, as she called it, _were_,
in any man, reducible, and if Paris were the place all happily to
reduce it. She had her doubts--anxious and aching on the spot, and had
expressed them to Mr. Pitman: certainly, of old, he had been more open
to the quotable than to the inexpressible, to charms than to charm. If
she could try the quotable, however, and with such a grand result, on
Mrs. Drack, she couldn't now on Murray--in respect to whom everything
had changed. So that if he hadn't a sense for the subtler appeal, the
appeal appreciable by people _not_ vulgar, on which alone she could
depend, what on earth would become of her? She could but yearningly
hope, at any rate, as she made up her mind to write to him immediately
at his club. It was a question of the right sensibility in him.
Perhaps he would have acquired it in Europe.

Two days later indeed--for he had promptly and charmingly replied,
keeping with alacrity the appointment she had judged best to propose
for a morning hour in a sequestered alley of the Park--two days later
she was to be struck well-nigh to alarm by everything he had acquired:
so much it seemed to make that it threatened somehow a complication,
and her plan, so far as she had arrived at one, dwelt in the desire
above all to simplify. She wanted no grain more of extravagance or
excess of anything--risking as she had done, none the less, a recall
of ancient license in proposing to Murray such a place of meeting. She