“I ought to have seen you before,” said Madame de Bellegarde. “You have paid several visits to my daughter.”
“Oh, yes,” said Newman, smiling; “Madame de Cintré and I are old friends by this time.”
“You have gone fast,” said Madame de Bellegarde.
“Not so fast as I should like,” said Newman, bravely.
“Oh, you are very ambitious,” answered the old lady.
“Yes, I confess I am,” said Newman, smiling.
Madame de Bellegarde looked at him with her cold fine eyes, and he returned her gaze, reflecting that she was a possible adversary and trying to take her measure. Their eyes remained in contact for some moments. Then Madame de Bellegarde looked away, and without smiling, “I am very ambitious, too,” she said.
Newman felt that taking her measure was not easy; she was a formidable, inscrutable little woman. She resembled her daughter, and yet she was utterly unlike her. The coloring in Madame de Cintré was the same, and the high delicacy of her brow and nose was hereditary. But her face was a larger and freer copy, and her mouth in especial a happy divergence from that conservative orifice, a little pair of lips at once plump and pinched, that looked, when closed, as if they could not open wider than to swallow a gooseberry or to emit an “Oh, dear, no!” which probably had been thought to give the finishing touch to the aristocratic prettiness of the Lady Emmeline Atheling as represented, forty years before, in several Books of Beauty. Madame de Cintré’s face had, to Newman’s eye, a range of expression as delightfully vast as the wind-streaked, cloud-flecked distance on a Western prairie. But her mother’s white, intense, respectable countenance, with its formal gaze, and its circumscribed smile, suggested a document signed and sealed; a thing of parchment, ink, and ruled lines. “She is a woman of conventions and proprieties,” he said to himself as he looked at her; “her world is the world of things immutably decreed. But how she is at home in it, and what a paradise she finds it. She walks about in it as if it were a blooming park, a Garden of Eden; and when she sees ‘This is genteel,’ or ‘This is improper,’ written on a mile-stone she stops ecstatically, as if she were listening to a nightingale or smelling a rose.” Madame de Bellegarde wore a little black velvet hood tied under her chin, and she was wrapped in an old black cashmere shawl.
“You are an American?” she said presently. “I have seen several Americans.”
“There are several in Paris,” said Newman jocosely.