ccepted my mission in good faith. I really believed--for reasons I
need not trouble you with--that it would be better for Madame Olenska
to recover her situation, her fortune, the social consideration that
her husband's standing gives her."

"So I supposed: you could hardly have accepted such a mission
otherwise."

"I should not have accepted it."

"Well, then--?" Archer paused again, and their eyes met in another
protracted scrutiny.

"Ah, Monsieur, after I had seen her, after I had listened to her, I
knew she was better off here."

"You knew--?"

"Monsieur, I discharged my mission faithfully: I put the Count's
arguments, I stated his offers, without adding any comment of my own.
The Countess was good enough to listen patiently; she carried her
goodness so far as to see me twice; she considered impartially all I
had come to say. And it was in the course of these two talks that I
changed my mind, that I came to see things differently."

"May I ask what led to this change?"

"Simply seeing the change in HER," M. Riviere replied.

"The change in her? Then you knew her before?"

The young man's colour again rose. "I used to see her in her husband's
house. I have known Count Olenski for many years. You can imagine
that he would not have sent a stranger on such a mission."

Archer's gaze, wandering away to the blank walls of the office, rested
on a hanging calendar surmounted by the rugged features of the
President of the United States. That such a conversation should be
going on anywhere within the millions of square miles subject to his
rule seemed as strange as anything that the imagination could invent.

"The change--what sort of a change?"

"Ah, Monsieur, if I could tell you!" M. Riviere paused. "Tenez--the
discovery, I suppose, of what I'd never thought of before: that she's
an American. And that if you're an American of HER kind--of your
kind--things that are accepted in certain other societies, or at least
put up with as part of a general convenient give-and-take--become
unthinkable, simply unthinkable. If Madame Olenska's relations
understood what these things were, their opposition to her returning
would no doubt be as unconditional as her own; but they seem to regard
her husband's wish to have her back as proof of an irresistible longing
for domestic life." M. Riviere paused, and then added: "Whereas it's
far from being as simple as that."

Archer looked back to the President of the