This lingering diffidence seemed to give a peculiar value to what was definite and assured in her manner; it made it seem like an accomplishment, a beautiful talent, something that one might compare to an exquisite touch in a pianist.

It was, in fact, Madame de Cintre's "authority," as they say of artists, that especially impressed and fascinated Newman; he always came back to the feeling that when he should complete himself by taking a wife, that was the way he should like his wife to interpret him to the world.

The only trouble, indeed, was that when the instrument was so perfect it seemed to interpose too much between you and the genius that used it.

Madame de Cintre gave Newman the sense of an elaborate education, of her having passed through mysterious ceremonies and processes of culture in her youth, of her having been fashioned and made flexible to certain exalted social needs.
All this, as I have affirmed, made her seem rare and precious--a very expensive article, as he would have said, and one which a man with an ambition to have everything about him of the best would find it highly agreeable to possess.

But looking at the matter with an eye to private felicity, Newman wondered where, in so exquisite a compound, nature and art showed their dividing line.