no other man a proof of this esteem; so
if you were to take me in an inferior sense I would never speak to you
again. Prove to this fine sore creature that our manners may have all
the grace without wanting to make such selfish terms for it. She avoids
society and lives quite alone, seeing no one but a horrible French
sister-in-law. Do let me hear that you've made her patience a little
less absent-minded. Make her WANT to forget; make her like you."

This ingenious appeal left the young man uneasy. He found himself in
presence of more complications than had been in his reckoning. To call
on Madame de Mauves with his present knowledge struck him as akin to
fishing in troubled waters. He was of modest composition, and yet he
asked himself whether an appearance of attentions from any gallant
gentleman mightn't give another twist to her tangle. A flattering sense
of unwonted opportunity, however--of such a possible value constituted
for him as he had never before been invited to rise to--made him with
the lapse of time more confident, possibly more reckless. It was too
inspiring not to act upon the idea of kindling a truer light in his fair
countrywoman's slow smile, and at least he hoped to persuade her that
even a raw representative of the social order she had not done justice
to was not necessarily a mere fortuitous collocation of atoms. He
immediately called on her.

II

She had been placed for her education, fourteen years before, in a
Parisian convent, by a widowed mammma who was fonder of Homburg and
Nice than of letting out tucks in the frocks of a vigorously growing
daughter. Here, besides various elegant accomplishments--the art of
wearing a train, of composing a bouquet, of presenting a cup of tea--she
acquired a certain turn of the imagination which might have passed for
a sign of precocious worldliness. She dreamed of marrying a man of
hierarchical "rank"--not for the pleasure of hearing herself called
Madame la Vicomtesse, for which it seemed to her she should never
greatly care, but because she had a romantic belief that the enjoyment
of inherited and transmitted consideration, consideration attached to
the fact of birth, would be the direct guarantee of an ideal delicacy
of feeling. She supposed it would be found that the state of being noble
does actually enforce the famous obligation. Romances are rarely worked
out in such transcendent good faith, and Euphemia's excuse was the prime
purity of her