en, on his return to the Rue de Rivoli,
where the family were still sitting in conclave upon their recent
visitor, Miss Durham summed up their groping comments in the phrase:
"I never saw anything so French!"

Durham, understanding what his sister's use of the epithet implied,
recognized it instantly as the explanation of his own feelings. Yes,
it was the finish, the modelling, which Madame de Malrive's
experience had given her that set her apart from the fresh
uncomplicated personalities of which she had once been simply the
most charming type. The influences that had lowered her voice,
regulated her gestures, toned her down to harmony with the warm dim
background of a long social past--these influences had lent to her
natural fineness of perception a command of expression adapted to
complex conditions. She had moved in surroundings through which one
could hardly bounce and bang on the genial American plan without
knocking the angles off a number of sacred institutions; and her
acquired dexterity of movement seemed to Durham a crowning grace. It
was a shock, now that he knew at what cost the dexterity had been
acquired, to acknowledge this even to himself; he hated to think
that she could owe anything to such conditions as she had been
placed in. And it gave him a sense of the tremendous strength of the
organization into which she had been absorbed, that in spite of her
horror, her moral revolt, she had not reacted against its external
forms. She might abhor her husband, her marriage, and the world to
which it had introduced her, but she had become a product of that
world in its outward expression, and no better proof of the fact was
needed than her exotic enjoyment of Americanism.

The sense of the distance to which her American past had been
removed was never more present to him than when, a day or two later,
he went with his mother and sisters to return her visit. The region
beyond the river existed, for the Durham ladies, only as the
unmapped environment of the Bon Marche; and Nannie Durham's
exclamation on the pokiness of the streets and the dulness of the
houses showed Durham, with a start, how far he had already travelled
from the family point of view.

"Well, if this is all she got by marrying a Marquis!" the young lady
summed up as they paused before the small sober hotel in its
high-walled court; and Katy, following her mother through the
stone-vaulted and stone-floored vestibule, murmured: "It must be
s