waistcoat, leaving him, the next minute, with an empty breast and hot temples. He wondered if it was thus that his son’s conducted itself in the presence of Miss Fanny Beaufort—and decided that it was not. “It functions as actively, no doubt, but the rhythm is different,” he reflected, recalling the cool composure with which the young man had announced his engagement, and taken for granted that his family would approve.
“The difference is that these young people take it for granted that they’re going to get whatever they want, and that we almost always took it for granted that we shouldn’t. Only, I wonder—the thing one’s so certain of in advance: can it ever make one’s heart beat as wildly?”
It was the day after their arrival in Paris, and the spring sunshine held Archer in his open window, above the wide silvery prospect of the Place Vendôme. One of the things he had stipulated—almost the only one—when he had agreed to come abroad with Dallas, was that, in Paris, he shouldn’t be made to go to one of the newfangled “palaces.”