envelope absent even from the brightest metals? He asked her one day
frankly if it had cost her nothing to transplant herself--if she weren't
oppressed with a sense of irreconcileable difference from "all these
people." She replied nothing at first, till he feared she might think it
her duty to resent a question that made light of all her husband's
importances. He almost wished she would; it would seem a proof that her
policy of silence had a limit. "I almost grew up here," she said at
last, "and it was here for me those visions of the future took shape
that we all have when we begin to think or to dream beyond mere
playtime. As matters stand one may be very American and yet arrange it
with one's conscience to live in Europe. My imagination perhaps--I had a
little when I was younger--helped me to think I should find happiness
here. And after all, for a woman, what does it signify? This isn't
America, no--this element, but it's quite as little France. France is
out there beyond the garden, France is in the town and the forest; but
here, close about me, in my room and"--she paused a moment--"in my mind,
it's a nameless, and doubtless not at all remarkable, little country of
my own. It's not her country," she added, "that makes a woman happy or
unhappy."

Madame Clairin, Euphemia's sister-in-law, might meanwhile have been
supposed to have undertaken the graceful task of making Longmore ashamed
of his uncivil jottings about her sex and nation. Mademoiselle de
Mauves, bringing example to the confirmation of precept, had made a
remunerative match and sacrificed her name to the millions of a
prosperous and aspiring wholesale druggist--a gentleman liberal enough
to regard his fortune as a moderate price for being towed into circles
unpervaded by pharmaceutic odours. His system possibly was sound, but
his own application of it to be deplored. M. Clairin's head was turned
by his good luck. Having secured an aristocratic wife he adopted an