She had succeeded too well; she had played her game too cleverly and she wished to mix up the cards.
Newman had told her, in due season, that her friend was "satisfactory." The epithet was not romantic, but Mrs.Tristram had no difficulty in perceiving that, in essentials, the feeling which lay beneath it was.
Indeed, the mild, expansive brevity with which it was uttered, and a certain look, at once appealing and inscrutable, that issued from Newman's half-closed eyes as he leaned his head against the back of his chair, seemed to her the most eloquent attestation of a mature sentiment that she had ever encountered.

Newman was, according to the French phrase, only abounding in her own sense, but his temperate raptures exerted a singular effect upon the ardor which she herself had so freely manifested a few months before.

She now seemed inclined to take a purely critical view of Madame de Cintre, and wished to have it understood that she did not in the least answer for her being a compendium of all the virtues.

"No woman was ever so good as that woman seems," she said.
"Remember what Shakespeare calls Desdemona; 'a supersubtle Venetian.' Madame de Cintre is a supersubtle Parisian.

She is a charming woman, and she has five hundred merits; but you had better keep that in mind." Was Mrs.Tristram simply finding out that she was jealous of her dear friend on the other side of the Seine, and that in undertaking to provide Newman with an ideal wife she had counted too much on her own disinterestedness?
We may be permitted to doubt it.