yet she was
utterly unlike her. The coloring in Madame de Cintre 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 Cintre'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.

"Oh, really?" said Madame de Bellegarde. "It was in England I saw
these, or somewhere else; not in Paris. I think it must have been in the
Pyrenees, many years ago. I am told your ladies are very pretty. One of
these ladies was very pretty! such a wonderful complexion! She presented
me a note of introduction from some one--I forgot whom--and she sent
with it a note of her own. I kept her letter a long time afterwards, it
was so strangely expressed. I used to know some of the phrases by heart.
But I have forgotten them now, it is so many years ago. Since then I
have seen no more Americans. I think my daughter-in-law has; she is a
great gad-about, she sees every one."

At this the younger lady came rustling forward, pinching in a very
slender waist, and casting idly preoccupied glances ov