of the rarest of women without recognising her, without making my
reflexion that, charm for charm, such a maniere d'etre is more
'fetching' even than the worst of Theresa's songs sung by a dissipated
duchess. Wit for wit, I think mine carries me further." It was easy
indeed to perceive that, as became a grand seigneur, M. de Mauves had a
stock of social principles. He wouldn't especially have desired perhaps
that his wife should compete in amateur operettas with the duchesses in
question, for the most part of comparatively recent origin; but he held
that a gentleman may take his amusement where he finds it, that he is
quite at liberty not to find it at home, and that even an adoptive
daughter of his house who should hang her head and have red eyes and
allow herself to make any other response to officious condolence than
that her husband's amusements were his own affair, would have forfeited
every claim to having her finger-tips bowed over and kissed. And yet in
spite of this definite faith Longmore figured him much inconvenienced by
the Countess's avoidance of betrayals. Did it dimly occur to him that
the principle of this reserve was self-control and not self-effacement?
She was a model to all the inferior matrons of his line, past and to
come, and an occasional "scene" from her at a manageable hour would have
had something reassuring--would have attested her stupidity rather
better than this mere polish of her patience.

Longmore would have given much to be able to guess how this latter
secret worked, and he tried more than once, though timidly and awkwardly
enough, to make out the game she was playing. She struck him as having
long resisted the force of cruel evidence, and, as though succumbing to
it at last, having denied herself on simple grounds of generosity the
right to complain. Her faith might have perished, but the sense of her
own old deep perversity remained. He believed her thus quite capable of
reproaching herself with having expected too much and of trying to