第10章

He performed this ceremony on the following day, when, by appointment, Christopher Newman went to dine with him.Mr.and Mrs.Tristram lived behind one of those chalk-colored facades which decorate with their pompous sameness the broad avenues manufactured by Baron Haussmann in the neighborhood of the Arc de Triomphe.

Their apartment was rich in the modern conveniences, and Tristram lost no time in calling his visitor's attention to their principal household treasures, the gas-lamps and the furnace-holes.

"Whenever you feel homesick," he said, "you must come up here.

We'll stick you down before a register, under a good big burner, and--""And you will soon get over your homesickness," said Mrs.Tristram.

Her husband stared; his wife often had a tone which he found inscrutable he could not tell for his life whether she was in jest or in earnest.The truth is that circumstances had done much to cultivate in Mrs.Tristram a marked tendency to irony.

Her taste on many points differed from that of her husband, and though she made frequent concessions it must be confessed that her concessions were not always graceful.

They were founded upon a vague project she had of some day doing something very positive, something a trifle passionate.

What she meant to do she could by no means have told you;but meanwhile, nevertheless, she was buying a good conscience, by installments.

It should be added, without delay, to anticipate misconception, that her little scheme of independence did not definitely involve the assistance of another person, of the opposite sex;she was not saving up virtue to cover the expenses of a flirtation.

For this there were various reasons.To begin with, she had a very plain face and she was entirely without illusions as to her appearance.She had taken its measure to a hair's breadth, she knew the worst and the best, she had accepted herself.

It had not been, indeed, without a struggle.As a young girl she had spent hours with her back to her mirror, crying her eyes out;and later she had from desperation and bravado adopted the habit of proclaiming herself the most ill-favored of women, in order that she might--as in common politeness was inevitable--be contradicted and reassured.It was since she had come to live in Europe that she had begun to take the matter philosophically.

Her observation, acutely exercised here, had suggested to her that a woman's first duty is not to be beautiful, but to be pleasing, and she encountered so many women who pleased without beauty that she began to feel that she had discovered her mission.

She had once heard an enthusiastic musician, out of patience with a gifted bungler, declare that a fine voice is really an obstacle to singing properly; and it occurred to her that it might perhaps be equally true that a beautiful face is an obstacle to the acquisition of charming manners.

Mrs.Tristram, then, undertook to be exquisitely agreeable, and she brought to the task a really touching devotion.

How well she would have succeeded I am unable to say;unfortunately she broke off in the middle.Her own excuse was the want of encouragement in her immediate circle.

But I am inclined to think that she had not a real genius for the matter, or she would have pursued the charming art for itself.

The poor lady was very incomplete.She fell back upon the harmonies of the toilet, which she thoroughly understood, and contented herself with dressing in perfection.She lived in Paris, which she pretended to detest, because it was only in Paris that one could find things to exactly suit one's complexion.

Besides out of Paris it was always more or less of a trouble to get ten-button gloves.When she railed at this serviceable city and you asked her where she would prefer to reside, she returned some very unexpected answer.She would say in Copenhagen, or in Barcelona; having, while making the tour of Europe, spent a couple of days at each of these places.On the whole, with her poetic furbelows and her misshapen, intelligent little face, she was, when you knew her, a decidedly interesting woman.

She was naturally shy, and if she had been born a beauty, she would (having no vanity) probably have remained shy.

Now, she was both diffident and importunate; extremely reserved sometimes with her friends, and strangely expansive with strangers.

She despised her husband; despised him too much, for she had been perfectly at liberty not to marry him.She had been in love with a clever man who had slighted her, and she had married a fool in the hope that this thankless wit, reflecting on it, would conclude that she had no appreciation of merit, and that he had flattered himself in supposing that she cared for his own.

Restless, discontented, visionary, without personal ambitions, but with a certain avidity of imagination, she was, as I have said before, eminently incomplete.She was full--both for good and for ill--of beginnings that came to nothing;but she had nevertheless, morally, a spark of the sacred fire.

Newman was fond, under all circumstances, of the society of women, and now that he was out of his native element and deprived of his habitual interests, he turned to it for compensation.

He took a great fancy to Mrs.Tristram; she frankly repaid it, and after their first meeting he passed a great many hours in her drawing-room.After two or three talks they were fast friends.

Newman's manner with women was peculiar, and it required some ingenuity on a lady's part to discover that he admired her.

He had no gallantry, in the usual sense of the term; no compliments, no graces, no speeches.Very fond of what is called chaffing, in his dealings with men, he never found himself on a sofa beside a member of the softer sex without feeling extremely serious.

He was not shy, and so far as awkwardness proceeds from a struggle with shyness, he was not awkward; grave, attentive, submissive, often silent, he was simply swimming in a sort of rapture of respect.