d him a little.

"For the reason you say. You're not stupid." And then abruptly, as if
bringing it out were somehow founded on that fact: "We're marrying
Jeanne."

It affected him on the spot as a move in a game, and he was even then
not without the sense that that wasn't the way Jeanne should be
married. But he quickly showed his interest, though--as quickly
afterwards struck him--with an absurd confusion of mind. "'You'? You
and--a--not Chad?" Of course it was the child's father who made the
'we,' but to the child's father it would have cost him an effort to
allude. Yet didn't it seem the next minute that Monsieur de Vionnet
was after all not in question?--since she had gone on to say that it
was indeed to Chad she referred and that he had been in the whole
matter kindness itself.

"If I must tell you all, it is he himself who has put us in the way. I
mean in the way of an opportunity that, so far as I can yet see, is all
I could possibly have dreamed of. For all the trouble Monsieur de
Vionnet will ever take!" It was the first time she had spoken to him
of her husband, and he couldn't have expressed how much more intimate
with her it suddenly made him feel. It wasn't much, in truth--there
were other things in what she was saying that were far more; but it was
as if, while they stood there together so easily in these cold chambers
of the past, the single touch had shown the reach of her confidence.
"But our friend," she asked, "hasn't then told you?"

"He has told me nothing."

"Well, it has come with rather a rush--all in a very few days; and
hasn't moreover yet taken a form that permits an announcement. It's
only for you--absolutely you alone--that I speak; I so want you to
know." The sense he had so often had, since the first hour of his
disembarkment, of being further and further "in," treated him again at
this moment to another twinge; but in this wonderful way of her putting
him in there continued to be something exquisitely remorseless.
"Monsieur de Vionnet will accept what he MUST accept. He has proposed
half a dozen things--each one more impossible than the other; and he
wouldn't have found this if he lives to a hundred. Chad found it," she
continued with her lighted, faintly flushed, her conscious confidential
face, "in the quietest way in the world. Or rather it found HIM--for
everything finds him; I mean finds him right. You'll think we do such
things strangely--but at my age," she smiled,