Madame de Treymes | Page 4

of his eye, and he was always struck anew by the vast and
consummately ordered spectacle of Paris: by its look of having been
boldly and deliberately planned as a background for the enjoyment of
life, instead of being forced into grudging concessions to the festive
instincts, or barricading itself against them in unenlightened ugliness,
like his own lamentable New York.
But to-day, if the scene had never presented itself more alluringly, in
that moist spring bloom between showers, when the horse-chestnuts
dome themselves in unreal green against a gauzy sky, and the very dust
of the pavement seems the fragrance of lilac made visible--to-day for
the first time the sense of a personal stake in it all, of having to reckon
individually with its effects and influences, kept Durham from an
unrestrained yielding to the spell. Paris might still be--to the
unimplicated it doubtless still was--the most beautiful city in the world;
but whether it were the most lovable or the most detestable depended

for him, in the last analysis, on the buttoning of the white glove over
which Fanny de Malrive still lingered.
The mere fact of her having forgotten to draw on her gloves as they
were descending in the hotel lift from his mother's drawing-room was,
in this connection, charged with significance to Durham. She was the
kind of woman who always presents herself to the mind's eye as
completely equipped, as made up of exquisitely cared for and
finely-related details; and that the heat of her parting with his family
should have left her unconscious that she was emerging gloveless into
Paris, seemed, on the whole, to speak hopefully for Durham's future
opinion of the city.
Even now, he could detect a certain confusion, a desire to draw breath
and catch up with life, in the way she dawdled over the last buttons in
the dimness of the porte-cochere, while her footman, outside, hung on
her retarded signal.
When at length they emerged, it was to learn from that functionary that
Madame la Marquise's carriage had been obliged to yield its place at
the door, but was at the moment in the act of regaining it. Madame de
Malrive cut the explanation short. "I shall walk home. The carriage this
evening at eight."
As the footman turned away, she raised her eyes for the first time to
Durham's.
"Will you walk with me? Let us cross the Tuileries. I should like to sit a
moment on the terrace."
She spoke quite easily and naturally, as if it were the most
commonplace thing in the world for them to be straying afoot together
over Paris; but even his vague knowledge of the world she lived in--a
knowledge mainly acquired through the perusal of yellow-backed
fiction--gave a thrilling significance to her naturalness. Durham, indeed,
was beginning to find that one of the charms of a sophisticated society
is that it lends point and perspective to the slightest contact between the
sexes. If, in the old unrestricted New York days, Fanny Frisbee, from a

brown stone door-step, had proposed that they should take a walk in the
Park, the idea would have presented itself to her companion as
agreeable but unimportant; whereas Fanny de Malrive's suggestion that
they should stroll across the Tuileries was obviously fraught with
unspecified possibilities.
He was so throbbing with the sense of these possibilities that he walked
beside her without speaking down the length of the wide alley which
follows the line of the Rue de Rivoli, suffering her even, when they
reached its farthest end, to direct him in silence up the steps to the
terrace of the Feuillants. For, after all, the possibilities were
double-faced, and her bold departure from custom might simply mean
that what she had to say was so dreadful that it needed all the tenderest
mitigation of circumstance.
There was apparently nothing embarrassing to her in his silence: it was
a part of her long European discipline that she had learned to manage
pauses with ease. In her Frisbee days she might have packed this one
with a random fluency; now she was content to let it widen slowly
before them like the spacious prospect opening at their feet. The
complicated beauty of this prospect, as they moved toward it between
the symmetrically clipped limes of the lateral terrace, touched him
anew through her nearness, as with the hint of some vast impersonal
power, controlling and regulating her life in ways he could not guess,
putting between himself and her the whole width of the civilization into
which her marriage had absorbed her. And there was such fear in the
thought--he read such derision of what he had to offer in the splendour
of the great avenues tapering upward to the sunset glories of the
Arch--that all he had