Archer did not really believe this. Little as he had
actually seen of Madame Olenska, he was beginning to
think that he could read her face, and if not her face,
her voice; and both had betrayed annoyance, and even
dismay, at Beaufort's sudden appearance. But, after all,
if this were the case, was it not worse than if she had
left New York for the express purpose of meeting him?
If she had done that, she ceased to be an object of
interest, she threw in her lot with the vulgarest of
dissemblers: a woman engaged in a love affair with
Beaufort "classed" herself irretrievably.
No, it was worse a thousand times if, judging
Beaufort, and probably despising him, she was yet drawn to
him by all that gave him an advantage over the other
men about her: his habit of two continents and two
societies, his familiar association with artists and actors
and people generally in the world's eye, and his careless
contempt for local prejudices. Beaufort was vulgar, he
was uneducated, he was purse-proud; but the circumstances
of his life, and a certain native shrewdness,
made him better worth talking to than many men,
morally and socially his betters, whose horizon was
bounded by the Battery and the Central Park. How
should any one coming from a wider world not feel the
difference and be attracted by it?
Madame Olenska, in a burst of irritation, had said to
Archer that he and she did not talk the same language;
and the young man knew that in some respects this was
true.
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