e said. "But to-day I don't see my blue bows at all. I don't
know what has become of them. To-day I see pink--a tender pink. And then
I pass through strange, dull phases in which neither blue nor pink says
anything to me. And yet I must have the bows."

"Have them green or yellow," said Newman.

"Malheureux!" the little marquise would cry. "Green bows would break
your marriage--your children would be illegitimate!"

Madame de Cintre was calmly happy before the world, and Newman had the
felicity of fancying that before him, when the world was absent, she
was almost agitatedly happy. She said very tender things. "I take no
pleasure in you. You never give me a chance to scold you, to correct
you. I bargained for that, I expected to enjoy it. But you won't do
anything dreadful; you are dismally inoffensive. It is very stupid;
there is no excitement for me; I might as well be marrying some one
else."

"I am afraid it's the worst I can do," Newman would say in answer to
this. "Kindly overlook the deficiency." He assured her that he, at
least, would never scold her; she was perfectly satisfactory. "If you
only knew," he said, "how exactly you are what I coveted! And I am
beginning to understand why I coveted it; the having it makes all the
difference that I expected. Never was a man so pleased with his good
fortune. You have been holding your head for a week past just as I
wanted my wife to hold hers. You say just the things I want her to say.
You walk about the room just as I want her to walk. You have just the
taste in dress that I want her to have. In short, you come up to the
mark, and, I can tell you, my mark was high."

These observations seemed to make Madame de Cintre rather grave. At last
she said, "Depend upon it, I don't come up to the mark; your mark is too
high. I am not all that you suppose; I am a much smaller affair. She
is a magnificent woman, your ideal. Pray, how did she come to such
perfection?"

"She was never anything else," Newman said.

"I really believe," Madame de Cintre went on, "that she is better than
my own ideal. Do you know that is a very handsome compliment? Well, sir,
I will make her my own!"

Mrs. Tristram came to see her dear Claire after Newman had announced his
engagement, and she told our hero the next day that his good fortune was
simply absurd. "For the ridiculous part of it is," she said, "that you
are evidently going to be as happy as if you were marrying Miss Smith
or Miss