riosity and lead him
to take her confidence by storm nothing could have served her purpose
better than this studied discretion. He measured the rare magnanimity
of self-effacement so deliberate, he felt how few women were capable of
exchanging a luxurious woe for a thankless effort. Madame de Mauves,
he himself felt, wasn't sweeping the horizon for a compensation or a
consoler; she had suffered a personal deception that had disgusted her
with persons. She wasn't planning to get the worth of her trouble back
in some other way; for the present she was proposing to live with
it peaceably, reputably and without scandal--turning the key on it
occasionally as you would on a companion liable to attacks of insanity.
Longmore was a man of fine senses and of a speculative spirit,
leading-strings that had never been slipped. He began to regard his
hostess as a figure haunted by a shadow which was somehow her intenser
and more authentic self. This lurking duality in her put on for him an
extraordinary charm. Her delicate beauty acquired to his eye the serious
cast of certain blank-browed Greek statues; and sometimes when his
imagination, more than his ear, detected a vague tremor in the tone in
which she attempted to make a friendly question seem to have behind it
none of the hollow resonance of absent-mindedness, his marvelling eyes
gave her an answer more eloquent, though much less to the point, than
the one she demanded.

She supplied him indeed with much to wonder about, so that he fitted, in
his ignorance, a dozen high-flown theories to her apparent history. She
had married for love and staked her whole soul on it; of that he was
convinced. She hadn't changed her allegiance to be near Paris and her
base of supplies of millinery; he was sure she had seen her perpetrated
mistake in a light of which her present life, with its conveniences for
shopping and its moral aridity, was the absolute negation. But by what
extraordinary process of the heart--through what mysterious intermission
of that moral instinct which may keep pace with the heart even when this
organ is making unprecedented time--had she fixed her affections on an
insolently frivolous Frenchman? Longmore needed no telling; he knew that
M. de Mauves was both cynical and shallow; these things were stamped
on his eyes, his nose, his mouth, his voice, his gesture, his step. Of
Frenchwomen themselves, when all was said, our young man, full of nursed
discriminations, went in