THE AMERICAN
at him, as usual, without constraint, and her great mild eyes, while she held out her hand, seemed to shine at him perhaps even straighter than before. She then remarkably observed, without a tremor in her voice, that she was glad to see him and that she hoped he was well. He found in her what he had found before—that faint perfume of a personal diffidence worn away by contact with the world, but the more perceptible the more closely she was approached. This subtle shyness gave a peculiar value to what was definite and assured in her manner, making it an acquired accomplishment, a beautiful talent, something that one might compare to an exquisite touch in a pianist. It was, in fact, her "authority," as they say of artists, that especially impressed and fascinated him; he always came back to the feeling that, when he should have rounded out his "success" by the right big marriage, this was the way he should like his wife to express the size of it to the world. The only trouble indeed was that when the instrument was so perfect it seemed to interpose too much between the audience and the composer. She gave him, the charming woman, the sense of an elaborate education, of her having passed through mysterious ceremonies and processes of culture in her youth, of her having been fashioned and made flexible to certain deep social needs. All this, as I have noted, made her seem rare and precious—a very expensive article, as he would have said, and one which a man with an ambition to have everything about him of the best would taste of triumph in possessing. Yet looking at the matter with an eye
165
