"Pray do"--and the Count made a great and friendly point of it. "You see
the confidence I have in you." Longmore said nothing and M. de Mauves
puffed his cigar reflectively and watched the smoke. "Madame de Mauves,"
he said at last, "is a rather singular person." And then while our young
man shifted his position and wondered whether he was going to "explain"
Madame de Mauves, "Being, as you are, her fellow countryman," this
lady's husband pursued, "I don't mind speaking frankly. She's a little
overstrained; the most charming woman in the world, as you see, but
a little volontaire and morbid. Now you see she has taken this
extraordinary fancy for solitude. I can't get her to go anywhere, to see
any one. When my friends present themselves she's perfectly polite, but
it cures them of coming again. She doesn't do herself justice, and I
expect every day to hear two or three of them say to me, 'Your wife's
jolie a croquer: what a pity she hasn't a little esprit.' You must
have found out that she has really a great deal. But, to tell the whole
truth, what she needs is to forget herself. She sits alone for hours
poring over her English books and looking at life through that terrible
brown fog they seem to me--don't they?--to fling over the world. I
doubt if your English authors," the Count went on with a serenity which
Longmore afterwards characterised as sublime, "are very sound reading
for young married women. I don't pretend to know much about them; but I
remember that not long after our marriage Madame de Mauves undertook to
read me one day some passages from a certain Wordsworth--a poet highly
esteemed, it appears, chez vous. It was as if she had taken me by the
nape of the neck and held my head for half an hour over a basin of soupe
aux choux: I felt as if we ought to ventilate the drawing-room before
any one called. But I suppose you know him--ce genie-la. Every nation
has its own ideals of every kind, but when I remember some of OUR
charming writers! I think at all events my wife never forgave me and
that it was a real shock to her to find she had married a man who had
very much the same taste in literature as in cookery. But you're a man
of general culture, a man of the world," said M. de Mauves, turning to
Longmore but looking hard at the seal of his watchguard. "You can talk
about everything, and I'm sure you like Alfred de Musset as well as
Monsieur Wordsworth. Talk to her about everything you can, Alfred de
Musset in