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Updated: June 18, 2025
When the dinner had been ordered he turned up his sketch, and the good woman fell to admiring and comparing, to picking up, off by the stream-side, the objects represented. Was it his work, Longmore wondered, that made him so happy? Was a strong talent the best thing in the world?
Longmore felt an immense desire to cry out a thousand times "No!" for it seemed to him at last that he was somehow only a graver equivalent of the young lover and that rustling Claudine was a lighter sketch of Madame de Mauves.
Longmore expressively repeated. "That's your whole life." "It's the life of many people," she made prompt answer "of most people of quiet tastes, and it's certainly better than acute distress. One's at a loss theoretically to defend compromises; but if I found a poor creature who had managed to arrive at one I should think myself not urgently called to expose its weak side."
Her voice was fresh and young; it represented almost aggressively to Longmore that she was as pleased as her companion. "Don't forget the Chenier," cried the young man, who, turning away, passed out of the gate and followed the path across the fields until he disappeared among the trees by the side of the stream. Who might Claudine be? Longmore vaguely wondered; and was she as pretty as her voice?
The Count's few moments with them had both chilled Longmore and angered him, casting a shadow across a prospect which had somehow, just before, begun to open and almost to brighten. He watched his companion narrowly as they went, and wondered what she had last had to suffer.
She wished to throw him off his balance and, if she was not mistaken, knew exactly how. "Put down your hat, Mr. Longmore," she said, "and be polite for once. You were not at all polite the other day when I asked you that friendly question about the state of your heart." "I HAVE no heart to talk about," he returned with as little grace. "As well say you've none at all.
Longmore met her advances with a formal politeness that covered a good deal of unflattering discomposure. She made him feel deeply uncomfortable; and though he was at a loss to conceive how he could be an object of interest to a sharp Parisienne he had an indefinable sense of being enclosed in a magnetic circle, of having become the victim of an incantation.
Longmore looked a while from one of these lucky persons to the other, barely stifled a sigh, bade them good-morning and took his departure. He knew neither where to go nor what to do; he seemed afloat on the sea of ineffectual longing. He strolled slowly back to the inn, where, in the doorway, he met the landlady returning from the butcher's with the lambchops for the dinner of her lodgers.
He thereupon took his leave; but going from thence to Mr. Henry Longmore's, cousin of Mr. Hayes, he related to him the story Mrs. Hayes had told him and expressed a good deal of dissatisfaction thereat, desiring Mr. Longmore to go to her and make the same enquiry as he had done, but without saying they had seen one another. Mr. Longmore went thereupon directly to Mrs.
She made eager enquiry about Madame de Mauves; but Longmore at first, as they sat looking out at the famous view of the Thames, parried her questions and confined himself to other topics.
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