and to keep you in the humor to see me—­if you must see me only to call me bad names—­I will agree to anything you choose; I will admit that I am the biggest snob in Paris.”  Newman, in fact, had declined an invitation personally given by the Princess Borealska, an inquiring Polish lady to whom he had been presented, on the ground that on that particular day he always dined at Mrs. Tristram’s; and it was only a tenderly perverse theory of his hostess of the Avenue d’Iena that he was faithless to his early friendships.  She needed the theory to explain a certain moral irritation by which she was often visited; though, if this explanation was unsound, a deeper analyst than I must give the right one.  Having launched our hero upon the current which was bearing him so rapidly along, she appeared but half-pleased at its swiftness.  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.  The inconsistent little lady of the Avenue d’Iena had an insuperable need of changing her place, intellectually.  She had a lively imagination, and she was capable, at certain times, of imagining the direct reverse of her most cherished beliefs, with a vividness more intense than that of conviction.  She got tired of thinking aright; but there was no serious harm in it, as she got equally tired of thinking wrong.  In the midst of her mysterious perversities she had admirable flashes of justice.  One of these occurred when Newman related to her that he had made a formal proposal to Madame de Cintre.  He repeated in a few words what he had said, and in a great many what she had answered.  Mrs. Tristram listened with extreme interest.