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The hard self-confidence of these people did it belong to the same world as that humbling, that heavenly self-abandonment which had shone on him that afternoon from Charles Richards' begrimed and blood-stained face? 'Blessed are the poor in spirit, he said to himself once with an inward groan. 'Why am I here? Why am I not at home with Catherine? But Madame de Netteville was pleasant to him.
Whether in his hours of intimacy with her twelve months before, young Alfred Evershed had received the same impression, may be doubted. In all things Eugénie de Netteville was an artist. Suddenly the curtain dividing them from the larger drawing-room was drawn back, and Sir John Headlam stood in the doorway. He had the glittering amused eyes of a malicious child as he looked at them.
But they were hidden deep in Elsmere's memory. A few days afterwards he was casually told that Madame de Netteville had left England for some time. As a matter of fact he never set eyes on her again. After a while the extravagance of his self-blame abated. He saw things as they were without morbidness. But a certain boyish carelessness of mood he never afterwards quite recovered.
The outburst was striking, but certainly unpardonably ill-timed. Madame de Netteville retreated into herself with a shrug. Robert, in whom a sore nerve had been set jarring, did his utmost to begin his talk with her again. In vain! for the squire struck in.
The idea that Madame de Netteville had tried her arts upon him was not without its piquancy. But while Robert was answering a question he was aware of a subtle change in the squire's attitude a relaxation of his own sense of tension. After a minute he bent forward, peering through the darkness.
Outside ran the long stretch of level turf, edged with a jewelled rim of flowers; and as the hill fell steeply underneath, the terrace was like a high green platform raised into air, in order that a Wendover might see his domain, which from thence lay for miles spread out before him. Here, beside the fountain, were gathered the Squire, Mrs. Darcy, Madame de Netteville, and two unknown men.
The laborers going home, the children with aprons full of crab-apples, and lips dyed by the first blackberries who passed him, got but an absent smile or salute from the Rector. The interval of exaltation and recoil was over. The ship of the mind was once more laboring in alien and dreary seas. He roused himself to remember that he had been curious to see Madame de Netteville.
Lady Aubrey also pushed away a cigarette case which lay beside her hand. Everybody there had the air more or less of an habitué of the house; and when the conversation began again, the Elsmeres found it very hard, in spite of certain perfunctory efforts on the part of Madame de Netteville, to take any share in it.
I think he might have made it plain to those good people that I don't want strange women at my Friday evenings. Lady Aubrey laughed. 'No doubt she is a genius, or a saint, in mufti. She might be handsome too if some one would dress her. Madame de Netteville shrugged her shoulders. 'Oh! life is not long enough to penetrate that kind of person, she said.
But when the softness and the grace were all lost in smart and humiliation, when the Madame de Netteville of ordinary life disappeared, and something took her place which was like a coarse and malignant underself suddenly brought into the light of day, from that point onward, in after days, he remembered it all.
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