t reasoning. Are you
very sure that she replied to your striking proposition in the gracious
manner you describe? You know how terribly incisive she is sometimes.
Didn't she, rather, do you the honor to say, 'A fiddlestick for your
phrases! There are better reasons than that'?"

"Other reasons were discussed," said the marquis, without looking
at Valentin, but with an audible tremor in his voice; "some of them
possibly were better. We are conservative, Mr. Newman, but we are not
also bigots. We judged the matter liberally. We have no doubt that
everything will be comfortable."

Newman had stood listening to these remarks with his arms folded and his
eyes fastened upon M. de Bellegarde, "Comfortable?" he said, with a sort
of grim flatness of intonation. "Why shouldn't we be comfortable? If you
are not, it will be your own fault; I have everything to make ME so."

"My brother means that with the lapse of time you may get used to the
change"--and Valentin paused, to light another cigarette.

"What change?" asked Newman in the same tone.

"Urbain," said Valentin, very gravely, "I am afraid that Mr. Newman does
not quite realize the change. We ought to insist upon that."

"My brother goes too far," said M. de Bellegarde. "It is his fatal want
of tact again. It is my mother's wish, and mine, that no such allusions
should be made. Pray never make them yourself. We prefer to assume
that the person accepted as the possible husband of my sister is one
of ourselves, and that he should have no explanations to make. With a
little discretion on both sides, everything, I think, will be easy. That
is exactly what I wished to say--that we quite understand what we
have undertaken, and that you may depend upon our adhering to our
resolution."

Valentin shook his hands in the air and then buried his face in them. "I
have less tact than I might have, no doubt; but oh, my brother, if you
knew what you yourself were saying!" And he went off into a long laugh.

M. de Bellegarde's face flushed a little, but he held his head higher,
as if to repudiate this concession to vulgar perturbability. "I am sure
you understand me," he said to Newman.

"Oh no, I don't understand you at all," said Newman. "But you needn't
mind that. I don't care. In fact, I think I had better not understand
you. I might not like it. That wouldn't suit me at all, you know. I want
to marry your sister, that's all; to do it as quickly as possible, and
to find fault