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Updated: June 18, 2025
"But I shall certainly write you a letter." She rose and turned homeward, thoughtfully rearranging her flowers as she walked. Little was said; Longmore was asking himself with an agitation of his own in the unspoken words whether all this meant simply that he was in love.
He is d'une etourderie " "You must allow me to carry the umbrella," Longmore risked; "there's too much of it for a lady." She assented, after many compliments to his politeness; and he walked by her side into the meadow. She went lightly and rapidly, picking her steps and glancing forward to catch a glimpse of her husband.
Longmore was struck first with his looking like a very clever man and then with his looking like a contented one. The combination, as it was expressed in his face, might have arrested the attention of a less exasperated reasoner. He had a slouched hat and a yellow beard, a light easel under one arm, and an unfinished sketch in oils under the other.
"I don't see why she's to be pitied," Longmore pleaded. "They seem a very happy couple." The landlady gave a knowing nod. "Don't trust to it, monsieur! Those artists ca na pas de principes! From one day to another he can plant her there! I know them, allez. I've had them here very often; one year with one, another year with another." Longmore was at first puzzled.
Longmore," his wife continued, "has gone to America." M. de Mauves took it a rare thing for him with confessed, if momentary, intellectual indigence. But he raised, as it were, the wind. "Has anything happened?" he asked, "Had he a sudden call?" But his question received no answer.
The landlady went back to her kitchen, and the young painter stood, as if he were waiting for something, beside the gate which opened upon the path across the fields. Longmore sat brooding and asking himself if it weren't probably better to cultivate the arts than to cultivate the passions. Before he had answered the question the painter had grown tired of waiting.
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.
She neither smiled nor looked flattered; it seemed indeed to Longmore that she took his reappearance with no pleasure. But he was uncertain, for he immediately noted that in his absence the whole character of her face had changed. It showed him something momentous had happened.
"And yet I took counsel with myself to-day and asked myself how I had best speak to you. On one side I might have refused to see you at all." Longmore made a violent movement, and she added: "In that case I should have written to you. I might see you, I thought, and simply say to you that there were excellent reasons why we should part, and that I begged this visit should be your last.
"And yet," said Longmore, provoked by what seemed the very wantonness of her patience, "the reality YOU 'happen to be in for' has, if I'm not in error, very recently taken a shape that keenly tests your philosophy." She seemed on the point of replying that his sympathy was too zealous; but a couple of impatient tears in his eyes proved it founded on a devotion of which she mightn't make light.
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