He performed this ceremony on the following day, when, by appointment, Christopher Newman went to dine with him.

Mr.and Mrs.Tristram lived behind one of those chalk-colored facades which decorate with their pompous sameness the broad avenues manufactured by Baron Haussmann in the neighborhood of the Arc de Triomphe.

Their apartment was rich in the modern conveniences, and Tristram lost no time in calling his visitor's attention to their principal household treasures, the gas-lamps and the furnace-holes.

"Whenever you feel homesick," he said, "you must come up here.

We'll stick you down before a register, under a good big burner, and--" "And you will soon get over your homesickness," said Mrs.Tristram.
Her husband stared; his wife often had a tone which he found inscrutable he could not tell for his life whether she was in jest or in earnest.
The truth is that circumstances had done much to cultivate in Mrs.
Tristram a marked tendency to irony.