form. "I can't thank you enough for having overcome my wife's shyness,"
he more than once declared. "If we left her to do as she pleased she
would--in her youth and her beauty--bury herself all absurdly alive.
Come often, and bring your good friends and compatriots--some of them
are so amusing. She'll have nothing to do with mine, but perhaps you'll
be able to offer her better son affaire."

M. de Mauves made these speeches with a bright assurance very amazing to
our hero, who had an innocent belief that a man's head may point out to
him the shortcomings of his heart and make him ashamed of them. He
couldn't fancy him formed both to neglect his wife and to take the
derisive view of her minding it. Longmore had at any rate an exasperated
sense that this nobleman thought rather the less of their interesting
friend on account of that very same fine difference of nature which so
deeply stirred his own sympathies. He was rarely present during the
sessions of the American visitor, and he made a daily journey to Paris,
where he had de gros soucis d'affaires as he once mentioned--with an
all-embracing flourish and not in the least in the tone of apology. When
he appeared it was late in the evening and with an imperturbable air of
being on the best of terms with every one and every thing which was
peculiarly annoying if you happened to have a tacit quarrel with him. If
he was an honest man he was an honest man somehow spoiled for
confidence. Something he had, however, that his critic vaguely envied,
something in his address, splendidly positive, a manner rounded and
polished by the habit of conversation and the friction of full
experience, an urbanity exercised for his own sake, not for his
neighbour's, which seemed the fruit of one of those strong temperaments
that rule the inward scene better than the best conscience. The Count
had plainly no sense for morals, and poor Longmore, who had the finest,
would have been glad to borrow his recipe for appearing then so to range