Madame de Treymes | Page 9

perpetual attitude of distrust--"but surely you have told me that
your husband's sister--what is her name? Madame de Treymes?--was
the most powerful member of the group, and that she has always been
on your side."
She hesitated. "Yes, Christiane has been on my side. She dislikes her
brother. But it would not do to ask her."
"But could no one else ask her? Who are her friends?"
"She has a great many; and some, of course, are mine. But in a case like
this they would be all hers; they wouldn't hesitate a moment between
us."
"Why should it be necessary to hesitate between you? Suppose
Madame de Treymes sees the reasonableness of what you ask; suppose,
at any rate, she sees the hopelessness of opposing you? Why should she
make a mystery of your opinion?"
"It's not that; it is that, if I went to her friends, I should never get her
real opinion from them. At least I should never know if it is was her

real opinion; and therefore I should be no farther advanced. Don't you
see?"
Durham struggled between the sentimental impulse to soothe her, and
the practical instinct that it was a moment for unmitigated frankness.
"I'm not sure that I do; but if you can't find out what Madame de
Treymes thinks, I'll see what I can do myself."
"Oh--you!" broke from her in mingled terror and admiration; and
pausing on her doorstep to lay her hand in his before she touched the
bell, she added with a half-whimsical flash of regret: "Why didn't this
happen to Fanny Frisbee?"

III

Why had it not happened to Fanny Frisbee?
Durham put the question to himself as he walked back along the quays,
in a state of inner commotion which left him, for once, insensible to the
ordered beauty of his surroundings. Propinquity had not been lacking:
he had known Miss Frisbee since his college days. In unsophisticated
circles, one family is apt to quote another; and the Durham ladies had
always quoted the Frisbees. The Frisbees were bold, experienced,
enterprising: they had what the novelists of the day called "dash." The
beautiful Fanny was especially dashing; she had the showiest national
attributes, tempered only by a native grace of softness, as the beam of
her eyes was subdued by the length of their lashes. And yet young
Durham, though not unsusceptible to such charms, had remained
content to enjoy them from a safe distance of good fellowship. If he
had been asked why, he could not have told; but the Durham of forty
understood. It was because there were, with minor modifications, many
other Fanny Frisbees; whereas never before, within his ken, had there
been a Fanny de Malrive.

He had felt it in a flash, when, the autumn before, he had run across her
one evening in the dining-room of the Beaurivage at Ouchy; when,
after a furtive exchange of glances, they had simultaneously arrived at
recognition, followed by an eager pressure of hands, and a long evening
of reminiscence on the starlit terrace. She was the same, but so
mysteriously changed! And it was the mystery, the sense of unprobed
depths of initiation, which drew him to her as her freshness had never
drawn him. He had not hitherto attempted to define the nature of the
change: it remained for his sister Nannie to do that when, on his return
to the Rue de Rivoli, where the family were still sitting in conclave
upon their recent visitor, Miss Durham summed up their groping
comments in the phrase: "I never saw anything so French!"
Durham, understanding what his sister's use of the epithet implied,
recognized it instantly as the explanation of his own feelings. Yes, it
was the finish, the modelling, which Madame de Malrive's experience
had given her that set her apart from the fresh uncomplicated
personalities of which she had once been simply the most charming
type. The influences that had lowered her voice, regulated her gestures,
toned her down to harmony with the warm dim background of a long
social past--these influences had lent to her natural fineness of
perception a command of expression adapted to complex conditions.
She had moved in surroundings through which one could hardly
bounce and bang on the genial American plan without knocking the
angles off a number of sacred institutions; and her acquired dexterity of
movement seemed to Durham a crowning grace. It was a shock, now
that he knew at what cost the dexterity had been acquired, to
acknowledge this even to himself; he hated to think that she could owe
anything to such conditions as she had been placed in. And it gave him
a sense of the tremendous strength of the organization into which she
had been absorbed, that in spite