most frigid. On the other hand, the society of Hebraic finance in which
the Comte de Verneuil found profit and entertainment was repugnant to
the delicately nurtured Englishwoman. She led a lonely existence. "I
have so few friends in Paris," were almost her first words to me on the
day of our meeting outside the Hotel Bristol. She went through the
world, her lips set in a smile, and her dear eyes frozen, and her heart
yearning for the sheltered English life with its rules for guidance and
its barriers of convention, its pleasant little routine of duties, and
its gentle communion of unemotional temperaments. Her eleven years
married life had been merely a suspension of existence. Her few
excursions into the unusual had been the scared adventures of a child.
Her romance was the romance of a child. Her gracious simplicity, and her
caressing adorableness which made my boy's love for her a passionate
worship which has lasted to this day, when we both are old and only meet
to shake heads together in palsied sympathy, were the essential charms
of a child. How should she understand the Paragot that I knew? His soul
still shone the stainless radiance that had dazzled her young eyes. That
was all that mattered. It was easy to convert the outer man to
convention. It was the simplest thing in the world to make the chartered
libertine of talk accept the Index Expurgatorius of subjects mete for
discussion: to regulate the innate vagabond by the clock: to bring the
pantheistic pagan of wide spiritual sympathies (for Paragot was by no
means an irreligious man) into the narrowest sphere of Anglicanism. The
colossal nature of her task did not occur to her; and there again she
exhibited a child's unreasoning confidence. Nor did it occur to her to
bid him throw off his undertaker's garb and gloom and to adopt his free
theories of life and conduct. At her mother's knee she had learned the
First Commandment, "Thou shalt have none other gods but me"; and
Joanna's god, though serving her sweet innocent soul all the reasonable
purposes of a deity, was Matthew Arnold's gigantic clergyman in a white
tie. In obedience to his maxims alone lay salvation: Joanna's conviction
was unshakable. As a matter of course Paragot must walk the same path.
There was not another one to walk.

Paragot accepted meekly my report of Joanna's tabu of the Black Boar.

"Whatever Madame de Verneuil says is right. I was forgetting that the
refrain of the ballade of the