She stood a moment longer. “Ah, you’re no use!” she rather harshly wailed. And she suddenly turned away and passed back into her sitting-room, with the heavy rustle of her far-trailing skirts. III “Elle ne doute de rien!” Littlemore said to himself as he walked away from the hotel; and he repeated the phrase in talking about her to Waterville. “She wants to be right,” he added; “but she’ll never really succeed. She has begun too late, she’ll never get on the true middle of the note. However, she won’t know when she’s wrong, so it doesn’t signify!” And he more or less explained what he meant by this discrimination. She’d remain in certain essentials incurable. She had no delicacy; no discretion; no shading; she was a woman who suddenly said to you, “You don’t really respect me!” As if that were a thing for a woman to say! “It depends upon what she meant by it.” Waterville could always imagine alternatives. “The more she meant by it the less she ought to say it!” Littlemore declared. But he returned to the Hôtel Meurice and on the next occasion took this companion with him. The secretary of legation, who had not often been in close quarters with pretty women whose respectability, or whose lack of it, was so frankly discussable, was prepared to find the well-known Texan belle a portentous type. He was afraid there might be danger in her, but on the whole he felt armed. The object of his devotion at present was his country, or at least the Department of State; he had no intention of being diverted from that allegiance. Besides, he had his ideal of the attractive woman—a person pitched in a very much lower key than this shining, smiling, rustling, chattering daughter of the Territories. The woman he should care for would have repose, a sense of the private in life, and the implied, even the withheld, in talk; would sometimes let one alone. Mrs. Headway was personal, familiar, intimate, perpetually appealing or accusing, demanding explanations and pledges, saying things one had to answer. All this was accompanied with a hundred smiles and radiations and other natural graces, but the general effect was distinctly fatiguing. She had certainly a great deal of charm, an immense desire to please, and a wonderful collection of dresses and trinkets; but she was eager and clamorous, and it was hard for other people to be put to serve her appetite. If she wanted to get into society there was no reason why those of her visitors who had the luck to be themselves independent, to be themselves placed, and to be themselves by the same token critical, should wish to see her there; for it was this absence of common social encumbrances made her drawing-room attractive. There was no doubt whatever that she was several women in one, and she ought to content herself with that sort of numerical triumph. Littlemore said to Waterville that it was stupid of her to wish to scale the