d; he felt a sharp, a sore desire to
cry out to him that he had the most precious wife in the world, that
he ought to be ashamed of himself not to know it, and that for all his
grand assurance he had never looked down into the depths of her eyes.
Richard de Mauves, we have seen, considered he had; but there was
doubtless now something in this young woman's eyes that had not been
there five years before. The two men conversed formally enough, and
M. de Mauves threw off a light bright remark or two about his visit to
America. His tone was not soothing to Longmore's excited sensibilities.
He seemed to have found the country a gigantic joke, and his blandness
went but so far as to allow that jokes on that scale are indeed
inexhaustible. Longmore was not by habit an aggressive apologist for the
seat of his origin, but the Count's easy diagnosis confirmed his worst
estimate of French superficiality. He had understood nothing, felt
nothing, learned nothing, and his critic, glancing askance at his
aristocratic profile, declared that if the chief merit of a long
pedigree was to leave one so fatuously stupid he thanked goodness the
Longmores had emerged from obscurity in the present century and in the
person of an enterprising timber-merchant. M. de Mauves dwelt of course
on that prime oddity of the American order--the liberty allowed the
fairer half of the unmarried young, and confessed to some personal study
of the "occasions" it offered to the speculative visitor; a line of
research in which, during a fortnight's stay, he had clearly spent his
most agreeable hours. "I'm bound to admit," he said, "that in every case
I was disarmed by the extreme candour of the young lady, and that they
took care of themselves to better purpose than I have seen some mammas
in France take care of them." Longmore greeted this handsome concession
with the grimmest of smiles and damned his impertinent patronage.

Mentioning, however, at last that he was about to leave Saint-Germain,
he was surprised, without exactly being flattered, by his interlocutor's
quickened attention. "I'm so very sorry; I hoped we had you for the
whole summer." Longmore murmured something civil and wondered why M.
de Mauves should care whether he stayed or went. "You've been a real
resource to Madame de Mauves," the Count added; "I assure you I've
mentally blessed your visits."

"They were a great pleasure to me," Longmore said gravely. "Some day I
expect to come back."