Madame de Treymes | Page 5

meant to say when he finally spoke compressed
itself at last into an abrupt unmitigated: "Well?"
She answered at once--as though she had only awaited the call of the
national interrogation--"I don't know when I have been so happy."
"So happy?" The suddenness of his joy flushed up through his fair skin.
"As I was just now--taking tea with your mother and sisters."

Durham's "Oh!" of surprise betrayed also a note of disillusionment,
which she met only by the reconciling murmur: "Shall we sit down?"
He found two of the springy yellow chairs indigenous to the spot, and
placed them under the tree near which they had paused, saying
reluctantly, as he did so: "Of course it was an immense pleasure to them
to see you again."
"Oh, not in the same way. I mean--" she paused, sinking into the chair,
and betraying, for the first time, a momentary inability to deal
becomingly with the situation. "I mean," she resumed smiling, "that it
was not an event for them, as it was for me."
"An event?" he caught her up again, eagerly; for what, in the language
of any civilization, could that word mean but just the one thing he most
wished it to?
"To be with dear, good, sweet, simple, real Americans again!" she burst
out, heaping up her epithets with reckless prodigality.
Durham's smile once more faded to impersonality, as he rejoined, just a
shade on the defensive: "If it's merely our Americanism you
enjoyed--I've no doubt we can give you all you want in that line."
"Yes, it's just that! But if you knew what the word means to me! It
means--it means--" she paused as if to assure herself that they were
sufficiently isolated from the desultory groups beneath the other
trees--"it means that I'm safe with them: as safe as in a bank!"
Durham felt a sudden warmth behind his eyes and in his throat. "I think
I do know--"
"No, you don't, really; you can't know how dear and strange and
familiar it all sounded: the old New York names that kept coming up in
your mother's talk, and her charming quaint ideas about Europe--their
all regarding it as a great big innocent pleasure ground and shop for
Americans; and your mother's missing the home-made bread and
preferring the American asparagus--I'm so tired of Americans who

despise even their own asparagus! And then your married sister's
spending her summers at--where is it?--the Kittawittany House on Lake
Pohunk--"
A vision of earnest women in Shetland shawls, with spectacles and thin
knobs of hair, eating blueberry pie at unwholesome hours in a shingled
dining-room on a bare New England hill-top, rose pallidly between
Durham and the verdant brightness of the Champs Elysees, and he
protested with a slight smile: "Oh, but my married sister is the black
sheep of the family--the rest of us never sank as low as that."
"Low? I think it's beautiful--fresh and innocent and simple. I remember
going to such a place once. They have early dinner--rather late--and go
off in buckboards over terrible roads, and bring back golden rod and
autumn leaves, and read nature books aloud on the piazza; and there is
always one shy young man in flannels--only one--who has come to see
the prettiest girl (though how he can choose among so many!) and who
takes her off in a buggy for hours and hours--" She paused and summed
up with a long sigh: "It is fifteen years since I was in America."
"And you're still so good an American."
"Oh, a better and better one every day!"
He hesitated. "Then why did you never come back?"
Her face altered instantly, exchanging its retrospective light for the look
of slightly shadowed watchfulness which he had known as most
habitual to it.
"It was impossible--it has always been so. My husband would not go;
and since--since our separation--there have been family reasons."
Durham sighed impatiently. "Why do you talk of reasons? The truth is,
you have made your life here. You could never give all this up!" He
made a discouraged gesture in the direction of the Place de la
Concorde.

"Give it up! I would go tomorrow! But it could never, now, be for more
than a visit. I must live in France on account of my boy."
Durham's heart gave a quick beat. At last the talk had neared the point
toward which his whole mind was straining, and he began to feel a
personal application in her words. But that made him all the more
cautious about choosing his own.
"It is an agreement--about the boy?" he ventured.
"I gave my word. They knew that was enough," she said proudly;
adding, as if to put him in full possession of her reasons: "It would have
been much more difficult