, I think mine carries me further." It was easy
indeed to perceive that, as became a grand seigneur, M. de Mauves had a
stock of social principles. He wouldn't especially have desired perhaps
that his wife should compete in amateur operettas with the duchesses in
question, for the most part of comparatively recent origin; but he held
that a gentleman may take his amusement where he finds it, that he
is quite at liberty not to find it at home, and that even an adoptive
daughter of his house who should hang her head and have red eyes and
allow herself to make any other response to officious condolence than
that her husband's amusements were his own affair, would have forfeited
every claim to having her finger-tips bowed over and kissed. And yet in
spite of this definite faith Longmore figured him much inconvenienced
by the Countess's avoidance of betrayals. Did it dimly occur to him that
the principle of this reserve was self-control and not self-effacement?
She was a model to all the inferior matrons of his line, past and to
come, and an occasional "scene" from her at a manageable hour would
have had something reassuring--would have attested her stupidity rather
better than this mere polish of her patience.

Longmore would have given much to be able to guess how this latter
secret worked, and he tried more than once, though timidly and awkwardly
enough, to make out the game she was playing. She struck him as having
long resisted the force of cruel evidence, and, as though succumbing to
it at last, having denied herself on simple grounds of generosity the
right to complain. Her faith might have perished, but the sense of her
own old deep perversity remained. He believed her thus quite capable
of reproaching herself with having expected too much and of trying to
persuade herself out of her bitterness by saying that her hopes had been
vanities and follies and that what was before her was simply Life. "I
hate tragedy," she once said to him; "I'm a dreadful coward about having
to suffer or to bleed. I've always tried to believe that--without
base concessions--such extremities may always somehow be dodged or
indefinitely postponed. I should be willing to buy myself off, from
having ever to be OVERWHELMED, by giving up--well, any amusement you
like." She lived evidently in nervous apprehension of being fatally
convinced--of seeing to the end of her deception. Longmore, when he
thought of this, felt the force of his desire to off