Her own colour rose at the question. It’s rather hard, when you come bearing yourself very much as the sibyl when she came to the Roman king, to be treated as something worse than a vulgar gossip. “I might tell you, monsieur,” she returned, “that you’ve as bad a ton as any young man I ever met. Where have you lived--what are your ideas? A stupid one of my own--possibly!--has been to call your attention to a fact that it takes some delicacy to touch upon. You’ve noticed, I suppose, that my sister-in-law isn’t the happiest woman in the world.” “Oh!”--Longmore made short work of it. She seemed to measure his intelligence a little uncertainly. “You’ve formed, I suppose,” she nevertheless continued, “your conception of the grounds of her discontent?” “It hasn’t required much forming. The grounds--or at least a specimen or two of them--have simply stared me in the face.” Madame Clairin considered a moment with her eyes on him. “Yes--ces choses-la se voient. My brother, in a single word, has the deplorable habit of falling in love with other women. I don’t judge him; I don’t judge my sister-in-law. I only permit myself to say that in her position I would have managed otherwise. I’d either have kept my husband’s affection or I’d have frankly done without it. But my sister’s an odd compound; I don’t profess to understand her. Therefore it is, in a measure, that I appeal to you, her fellow countryman. Of course you’ll be surprised at my way of looking at the matter, and I admit that it’s a way in use only among people whose history--that of a race--has cultivated in them the sense for high political solutions.” She paused and Longmore wondered where the history of her race was going to lead her. But she clearly saw her course. “There has never been a galant homme among us, I fear, who has not given his wife, even when she was very charming, the right to be jealous. We know our history for ages back, and the fact’s established. It’s not a very edifying one if you like, but it’s something to have scandals with pedigrees--if you can’t have them with attenuations. Our men have been Frenchmen of France, and their wives--I may say it--have been of no meaner blood. You may see all their portraits at our poor charming old house--every one of them an ‘injured’ beauty, but not one of them hanging her head. Not one of them ever had the bad taste to be jealous, and yet not one in a dozen ever consented to an indiscretion--allowed herself, I mean, to be talked about. Voila comme elles ont su s’arranger. How they did it--go and look at the dusky faded canvases and pastels and ask. They were dear brave women of wit. When they had a headache they put on a little rouge and came to supper as usual, and when they had a heart-ache they touched up that quarter with just such another brush. These are great traditions and charming precedents, I hold, and it doesn’t seem to me fair that a little American bourgeoise should come in and pretend to alter them--all