THE AMERICAN
Once in the street he stood for some time on the pavement, wondering if after all he had not been most an ass not to offer to the great lady's inhalation his nosegay of strange flowers. And then he decided, he quite had the sense of discovering, that he should simply hate to talk of the Bellegardes with any one. The thing he most wanted to do, it suddenly appeared, was to banish them from his mind and never think of them again. Indecision had, however, not hitherto been one of his weaknesses, and in this case it was not of long duration. For three days he applied all his thought to not thinking—thinking, that is, of the Marquise and her son. He dined with Mrs. Tristram and, on her mentioning their name, requested her almost austerely to desist. This gave Tom Tristram a much-coveted opportunity to offer condolences.
He leaned forward, laying his hand on Newman's arm, compressing his lips and shaking his head. "The fact is, my dear fellow, you see you ought never to have gone into it. It was not your doing, I know—it was all my wife. If you want to come down on her I'll stand off: I give you leave to hit her as hard as you like. You know she has never had a flick of the whip from me in her life, and I do think she wants to be a bit touched up. Why did n't you listen to me? You know I did n't believe in the thing. I thought it at the best a high jump in which you might bruise a shin. I don't profess to have been a tremendous homme à femmes, as they say here, but I 've instincts about the sex that, hang it, I've honestly come by. I've never mistrusted a woman in my life that she
509
