“Immensely,” answered Pembroke, with much heartiness, and wishing Madame Koller would sing again. He hardly knew which was the more exasperating, Madame Koller’s tone to him in speaking of Olivia, or Olivia’s tone in speaking of Madame Koller. “Olivia is so excessively tame,” said she, after a pause. “So cold--so self-contained.” “I don’t think she lacks spirit, though,” responded Pembroke, with the easy air of a man discussing the most trivial subject, although he swore mentally at Madame Koller for introducing the subject. “Miss Berkeley has the reticence of a gentlewoman. But by heaven! I wouldn’t like to arouse that spirit of hers.” Madame Koller sighed. It was a real and genuine sigh. She was thinking how hard and strange it was that she was not permitted by fate to be either a complete gentlewoman or a complete artist. She had learned in her student days, and in that brief and brilliant artistic period, to be reticent about her money matters, but that was all. She saw even in her Aunt Sally Peyton, whom she regarded as an interfering old person, without any style whatever, a certain air of security in what she said and did--a calm indifference to her world--that Madame Koller was keen enough to know marked the gentlewoman--which she, Elise Koller, who had ten times the advantages, and had twenty times the knowledge of the world that old Mrs. Peyton had, was never quite sure--there just was a little uncertainty--ah, it was very little, but it made a great deal of difference. “America seems queer enough to me now,” she said presently. “Very likely,” answered Pembroke. “You have remained here much longer already than I expected.” Madame Koller at this fixed her eyes upon Pembroke in a way that made him wince. A blush, too, showed through his dark skin. “Can you--can you--say _that_ to me?” she cried. Like any other man under the same circumstances, Pembroke remained perfectly silent--because it is a well-known fact that when a woman takes the initiative in tender speeches, the man, if he be a man, is at once silenced. But Madame Koller was fluent. “I know what you think of me,” she said. This surprised Pembroke, who really did not know what he thought of her. “You think me the weakest woman in the world. But I have been strong. While my husband lived, heaven knows what I endured. He was the cruelest creature God ever made.” Pembroke thought it was the same old story of continental husbands and wives. He had once known a marchese who made no secret that he occasionally beat his marchesa. But Madame Koller almost made him smile at the grotesqueness of what she told him, although it was real enough to her to make her weep in the telling.