Count
had plainly no sense for morals, and poor Longmore, who had the finest,
would have been glad to borrow his recipe for appearing then so to range
the whole scale of the senses. What was it that enabled him, short of
being a monster with visibly cloven feet and exhaling brimstone, to
misprize so cruelly a nature like his wife's and to walk about the world
with such a handsome invincible grin? It was the essential grossness of
his imagination, which had nevertheless helped him to such a store of
neat speeches. He could be highly polite and could doubtless be damnably
impertinent, but the life of the spirit was a world as closed to him as
the world of great music to a man without an ear. It was ten to one
he didn't in the least understand how his wife felt; he and his smooth
sister had doubtless agreed to regard their relative as a Puritanical
little person, of meagre aspirations and few talents, content with
looking at Paris from the terrace and, as a special treat, having a
countryman very much like herself to regale her with innocent echoes
of their native wit. M. de Mauves was tired of his companion; he
liked women who could, frankly, amuse him better. She was too dim, too
delicate, too modest; she had too few arts, too little coquetry,
too much charity. Lighting a cigar some day while he summed up his
situation, her husband had probably decided she was incurably stupid.
It was the same taste, in essence, our young man moralised, as the taste
for M. Gerome and M. Baudry in painting and for M. Gustave Flaubert and
M. Charles Baudelaire in literature. The Count was a pagan and his wife
a Christian, and between them an impassable gulf. He was by race and
instinct a grand seigneur. Longmore had often heard of that historic
type, and was properly grateful for an opportunity to examine it
closely. It had its elegance of outline, but depended on spiritual
sources so remote from those of which he felt the living gush in his own
soul that he found himself gazing at it, in irreconcileable antipathy,
through a dim historic mist. "I'm a modern bourgeois," he said, "and
not perhaps so good a judge of how far a pretty woman's tongue may go at
supper before the mirrors properly crack to hear. But I've not met
one of the rarest of women without recognising her, without making
my reflexion that, charm for charm, such a maniere d'etre is more
'fetching' even than the worst of Theresa's songs sung by a dissipated
duchess. Wit for wit