The weight of the name

CHAPTER

The automobile turned sharply about the chevet of Saint-François-Xavier. With an instinctive movement, Landri de Claviers-Grandchamp seized the megaphone. He called to the chauffeur to stop before one of the side entrances. The powerful limousin was still in motion when he jumped out upon the sidewalk and disappeared within the church, to reappear a few seconds later, by way of the main portal, on Boulevard des Invalides. With the elegant and self-assured bearing characteristic of Landri, with his charming face, at once soldierly and thoughtful, which a proud, almost haughty mouth, beneath the slightly tawny veil of the mustache, would have made too stern had not the eyes, of a caressing brown, softened its expression, that childlike stratagem could mean, but one thing,—the desire, to guard from curiosity and comments a clandestine rendezvous.
It was true, but—a circumstance which would have made the officers of the dragoon regiment in which the young count was serving as a lieutenant burst with laughter—he had this rendezvous with a woman with whom he was madly in love without having ever obtained anything from her. What do I say? He had not even ventured, except on one occasion, to speak to her of his sentiments.
How many elements in his life had conspired to make him a fop and blasé: that face and that profession, his fortune and his name—one of the best in France, which had lacked nothing but the éclat of great offices at court! But Landri was born romantic. He was still romantic at twenty-nine. In him, as in the hearts of all genuinely tender-hearted men, emotion neutralized vanity.
He had met Madame Olier in 1903. That was the name of the woman in question, a widow to-day, then the wife of one of his comrades. It was now 1906, so that he had loved her for three years. It had never entered his head that such perseverance in a dumb and unselfish devotion was a delusion. He thought so less than ever on this warm and, so to speak, languid morning of late November, as he went his way, drawn on, uplifted by a proximate hope.