matrimony. Sometimes a word, a look, a gesture of Euphemia's gave him
the oddest sense of being, or of seeming at least, almost bashful; for
she had a way of not dropping her eyes according to the mysterious
virginal mechanism, of not fluttering out of the room when she found him
there alone, of treating him rather as a glorious than as a pernicious
influence--a radiant frankness of demeanour in fine, despite an infinite
natural reserve, which it seemed at once graceless not to be
complimentary about and indelicate not to take for granted. In this way
had been wrought in the young man's mind a vague unwonted resonance of
soft impressions, as we may call it, which resembled the happy stir of
the change from dreaming pleasantly to waking happily. His imagination
was touched; he was very fond of music and he now seemed to give easy
ear to some of the sweetest he had ever heard. In spite of the bore of
being laid up with a lame knee he was in better humour than he had known
for months; he lay smoking cigarettes and listening to the nightingales
with the satisfied smile of one of his country neighbours whose big ox
should have taken the prize at a fair. Every now and then, with an
impatient suspicion of the resemblance, he declared himself pitifully
bete; but he was under a charm that braved even the supreme penalty of
seeming ridiculous. One morning he had half an hour's tete-a-tete with
his grandmother's confessor, a soft-voiced old Abbe whom, for reasons of
her own, Madame de Mauves had suddenly summoned and had left waiting in
the drawing-room while she rearranged her curls. His reverence, going up
to the old lady, assured her that M. le Comte was in a most edifying
state of mind and the likeliest subject for the operation of grace. This
was a theological interpretation of the count's unusual equanimity. He
had always lazily wondered what priests were good for, and he now
remembered, with a sense of especial obligation to the Abbe, that they
were excellent for marrying people.