The Marchioness Manson shook her head softly. “Time—time; I must have time. I know my Ellen—haughty, intractable; shall I say, just a shade unforgiving?”
“But, good heavens, to forgive is one thing; to go back into that hell—”
“Ah, yes,” the Marchioness acquiesced. “So she describes it—my sensitive child! But on the material side, Mr. Archer, if one may stoop to consider such things; do you know what she is giving up? Those roses there on the sofa—acres like them, under glass and in the open, in his matchless terraced gardens at Nice! Jewels—historic pearls: the Sobieski emeralds—sables—but she cares nothing for all these! Art and beauty, those she does care for, she lives for, as I always have; and those also surrounded her. Pictures, priceless furniture, music, brilliant conversation—ah, that, my dear young man, if you’ll excuse me, is what you’ve no conception of here! And she had it all; and the homage of the greatest. She tells me she is not thought handsome in New York—good heavens! Her portrait has been painted nine times; the greatest artists in Europe have begged for the privilege. Are these things nothing? And the remorse of an adoring husband?”
As the Marchioness Manson rose to her climax her face assumed an expression of ecstatic retrospection which would have moved Archer’s mirth had he not been numb with amazement.
He would have laughed if anyone had foretold to him that his first sight of poor Medora Manson would have been in the guise of a messenger of Satan; but he was in no mood for laughing now, and she seemed to him to come straight out of the hell from which Ellen Olenska had just escaped.
“She knows nothing yet—of all this?” he asked abruptly.
Mrs. Manson laid a purple finger on her lips. “Nothing directly—but does she suspect? Who can tell? The truth is, Mr. Archer, I have been