Edith Wharton

Madame de Treymes Edith Wharton

John Durham, while he waited for Madame de Malrive to draw on her gloves, stood in the hoteldoorway looking out across the Rue de Rivoli at the afternoon brightness of the Tuileries gardens. His European visits were infrequent enough to have kept unimpaired the freshness of his eye, and he was always struck anew by the vast and consummately ordered spectacle of Paris: by its lookof having been boldly and deliberately planned as a background for the enjoyment of life, instead ofbeing forced into grudging concessions to the festive instincts, or barricading itself against them inunenlightened ugliness, like his own lamentable New York. But to-day, if the scene had never presented itself more alluringly, in that moist spring bloombetween showers, when the horse-chestnuts dome themselves in unreal green against a gauzy sky, and the very dust of the pavement seems the fragrance of lilac made visible-to-day for the firsttime the sense of a personal stake in it all, of having to reckon individually with its effects andinfluences, kept Durham from an unrestrained yielding to the spell. Paris might still be-to theunimplicated it doubtless still was-the most beautiful city in the world; but whether it were themost lovable or the most detestable depended for him, in the last analysis, on the buttoning of thewhite glove over which Fanny de Malrive still lingered. The mere fact of her having forgotten to draw on her gloves as they were descending in thehotel lift from his mother's drawing-room was, in this connection, charged with significance toDurham. She was the kind of woman who always presents herself to the mind's eye as completelyequipped, as made up of exquisitely cared for and finely-related details; and that the heat of herparting with his family should have left her unconscious that she was emerging gloveless into Paris, seemed, on the whole, to speak hopefully for Durham's future opinion of the city. Even now, he could detect a certain confusion, a desire to draw breath and catch up with life, inthe way she dawdled over the last buttons in the dimness of the porte-cochere, while her footman, outside, hung on her retarded sig