pliant softness and fine adjustability that idealism naturally seemed to
him a losing game.

Euphemia, as he lay on his sofa, struck him as by no means
contradictory; she simply reminded him that very young women are
generally innocent and that this is on the whole the most potent source
of their attraction. Her innocence moved him to perfect consideration,
and it seemed to him that if he shortly became her husband it would
be exposed to a danger the less. Old Madame de Mauves, who flattered
herself that in this whole matter she was very laudably rigid, might
almost have taken a lesson from the delicacy he practised. For two or
three weeks her grandson was well-nigh a blushing boy again. He watched
from behind the Figaro, he admired and desired and held his tongue. He
found himself not in the least moved to a flirtation; he had no wish
to trouble the waters he proposed to transfuse into the golden cup of
matrimony. Sometimes a word, a look, a gesture of Euphemia's gave him
the oddest sense of being, or of seeming at least, almost bashful;
for she had a way of not dropping her eyes according to the mysterious
virginal mechanism, of not fluttering out of the room when she found him
there alone, of treating him rather as a glorious than as a pernicious
influence--a radiant frankness of demeanour in fine, despite an
infinite natural reserve, which it seemed at once graceless not to be
complimentary about and indelicate not to take for granted. In this way
had been wrought in the young man's mind a vague unwonted resonance of
soft impressions, as we may call it, which resembled the happy stir of
the change from dreaming pleasantly to waking happily. His imagination
was touched; he was very fond of music and he now seemed to give easy
ear to some of the sweetest he had ever heard. In spite of the bore of
being laid up with a lame knee he was in better humour than he had known
for months; he lay smoking cigarettes and listening to the nightingales
with the satisfied smile of one of his country neighbours whose big
ox should have taken the prize at a fair. Every now and then, with an
impatient suspicion of the resemblance, he declared himself pitifully
bete; but he was under a charm that braved even the supreme penalty of
seeming ridiculous. One morning he had half an hour's tete-a-tete with
his grandmother's confessor, a soft-voiced old Abbe whom, for reasons of
her own, Madame de Mauves had suddenly summoned and had left wait