melancholy in turn, and her gaiety, like her sadness, seemed
spontaneous. She could be gracious, disdainful, insolent, or
confiding at will. Her apparent good nature was real; she had no
temptation to descend to malignity. But at each moment her mood
changed; she was full of confidence or craft; her moving
tenderness would give place to a heart-breaking hardness and
insensibility. Yet how paint her as she was, without bringing
together all the extremes of feminine nature? In a word, the
Duchess was anything that she wished to be or to seem. Her face
was slightly too long. There was a grace in it, and a certain
thinness and fineness that recalled the portraits of the Middle
Ages. Her skin was white, with a faint rose tint. Everything
about her erred, as it were, by an excess of delicacy.

M. de Montriveau willingly consented to be introduced to the
Duchesse de Langeais; and she, after the manner of persons whose
sensitive taste leads them to avoid banalities, refrained from
overwhelming him with questions and compliments. She received
him with a gracious deference which could not fail to flatter a
man of more than ordinary powers, for the fact that a man rises
above the ordinary level implies that he possesses something of
that tact which makes women quick to read feeling. If the
Duchess showed any curiosity, it was by her glances; her
compliments were conveyed in her manner; there was a winning
grace displayed in her words, a subtle suggestion of a desire to
please which she of all women knew the art of manifesting. Yet
her whole conversation was but, in a manner, the body of the
letter; the postscript with the principal thought in it was still
to come. After half an hour spent in ordinary talk, in which the
words gained all their value from her tone and smiles, M. de