as he reflected that she might come in with the knowledge
of his supreme admiration and of the project he had built upon it in her
eyes; but the feeling was not disagreeable. Her face could wear no
look that would make it less beautiful, and he was sure beforehand that
however she might take the proposal he had in reserve, she would not
take it in scorn or in irony. He had a feeling that if she could only
read the bottom of his heart and measure the extent of his good will
toward her, she would be entirely kind.

She came in at last, after so long an interval that he wondered whether
she had been hesitating. She smiled with her usual frankness, and held
out her hand; she looked at him straight with her soft and luminous
eyes, and said, without a tremor in her voice, that she was glad to see
him and that she hoped he was well. He found in her what he had found
before--that faint perfume of a personal shyness worn away by contact
with the world, but the more perceptible the more closely you approached
her. This lingering diffidence seemed to give a peculiar value to
what was definite and assured in her manner; it made it seem like an
accomplishment, a beautiful talent, something that one might compare
to an exquisite touch in a pianist. It was, in fact, Madame de Cintre's
"authority," as they say of artists, that especially impressed and
fascinated Newman; he always came back to the feeling that when he
should complete himself by taking a wife, that was the way he should
like his wife to interpret him to the world. The only trouble, indeed,
was that when the instrument was so perfect it seemed to interpose too
much between you and the genius that used it. Madame de Cintre gave
Newman the sense of an elaborate education, of her having passed through
mysterious ceremonies and processes of culture in her youth, of her
having been fashioned and made flexible to certain exalted social needs.
All this, as I have affirmed, made her seem rare and precious--a very
expensive article, as he would have said, and one which a man with an
ambition to have everything about him of the best would find it highly
agreeable to possess. But looking at the matter with an eye to private
felicity, Newman wondered where, in so exquisite a compound, nature and
art showed their dividing line. Where did the special intention separate
from the habit of good manners? Where did urbanity end and sincerity
begin? Newman asked himself these questions even