I suppose that now you will raise your
protest."

"My protest be hanged!" murmured Newman, disgustedly.

But his tone found no echo in that in which Valentin, with his hand on
the door, to return to his mother's apartment, exclaimed, "But I shall
see her now! She is very remarkable--she is very remarkable!"

CHAPTER XIII

Newman kept his promise, or his menace, of going often to the Rue de
l'Universite, and during the next six weeks he saw Madame de Cintre more
times than he could have numbered. He flattered himself that he was not
in love, but his biographer may be supposed to know better. He claimed,
at least, none of the exemptions and emoluments of the romantic passion.
Love, he believed, made a fool of a man, and his present emotion was not
folly but wisdom; wisdom sound, serene, well-directed. What he felt
was an intense, all-consuming tenderness, which had for its object an
extraordinarily graceful and delicate, and at the same time impressive,
woman who lived in a large gray house on the left bank of the Seine.
This tenderness turned very often into a positive heart-ache; a sign
in which, certainly, Newman ought to have read the appellation which
science has conferred upon his sentiment. When the heart has a heavy
weight upon it, it hardly matters whether the weight be of gold or of
lead; when, at any rate, happiness passes into that place in which it
becomes identical with pain, a man may admit that the reign of wisdom
is temporarily suspended. Newman wished Madame de Cintre so well that
nothing he could think of doing for her in the future rose to the high
standard which his present mood had set itself. She seemed to him so
felicitous a product of nature and circumstance that his invention,
musing on future combinations, was constantly catching its breath with
the fear of stumbling into some brutal compression or mutilation of her
beautiful personal harmony. This is what I mean by Newman's tenderness:
Madame de Cintre pleased him so, exactly as she was, that his desire
to interpose between her and the troubles of life had the quality of a
young mother's eagerness to protect the sleep of her first-born child.
Newman was simply charmed, and he handled his charm as if it were a
music-box which would stop if one shook it. There can be no better proof
of the hankering epicure that is hidden in every man's temperament,
waiting for a signal from some divine confederate that he may safely
peep out. Newman at