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He stroked his pepper-and-salt moustache with a gesture intended rather to indicate than conceal the smile of experience beneath it. "Well, Madame de Treymes has not been like a happy country she's had a history: several of 'em. Some one said she constituted the feuilleton of the Faubourg daily news. La suite au prochain numero you see the point? Not that I speak from personal knowledge.
Still, in this case " Madame de Treymes paused "since she has no religious scruples, and she had no difficulty in obtaining a separation, why should she fear any in demanding a divorce?" "I don't know that she does: but the mere fact of possible opposition might be enough to alarm the delicacy you have observed in her." "Ah yes: on her boy's account." "Partly, doubtless, on her boy's account."
On the appearance of Madame de Treymes, however, such considerations gave way to the immediate act of wondering how she meant to carry off her share of the adventure. Durham had not forgotten the note on which their last conversation had closed: the lapse of time serving only to give more precision and perspective to the impression he had then received.
What we really do is to give him back to his race, his religion, his true place in the order of things." "His mother never tried to deprive him of any of those inestimable advantages!" Madame de Treymes unclasped her hands with a slight gesture of deprecation. "Not consciously, perhaps; but silences and reserves can teach so much. His mother has another point of view " "Thank heaven!"
"Personally I have no desire to thrust myself into French society I can't see how any American woman can do so without loss of self-respect. But any one can tell you about Madame de Treymes." "I wish you would, then," Durham suggested. "Well, I think Elmer had better," said his wife mysteriously, as Mr.
Durham thought her voice had risen unduly once or twice during his visit, and when, on taking leave, he went to summon her from the inner room, he found the higher note of ecstasy had been evoked by the appearance of Madame de Treymes, and that the little boy, himself absorbed in a new toy of Durham's bringing, was being bent over by an actual as well as a potential aunt.
The uneasiness thus temporarily repressed slipped into the final disguise of hoping he should not again meet Madame de Treymes; and in this wish he was seconded by the decision, in which Madame de Malrive concurred, that it would be well for him to leave Paris while the preliminary negotiations were going on.
"Every man in my position gives himself his own reasons for hoping," he interposed with a smile. "I understand that too," Madame de Treymes assented. "But still you spent a great deal of money the other day at our bazaar." "Yes: I wanted to have a talk with you, and it was the readiest if not the most distinguished means of attracting your attention."
She has, of course, studied other communities than New York: the priest-ridden Italy of the eighteenth century in The Valley of Decision; modern France in Madame de Treymes and The Reef; provincial New England in The Fruit of the Tree.
But de Treymes has gone down to their place in Brittany, and as my mother-in-law is with another daughter in Auvergne, Christiane came here for a few days. With me, you see, she need not pretend she can cry her eyes out." "And that is what she is doing?"
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