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A mean desire not to have Madame Olenska seen at the Beauforts' door vanished as he felt the penetrating warether," he broke out, hardly knohat he said
"Ah," she answered, "Granny has told you?"
While he watched her he are that Lefferts and Chivers, on reaching the farther side of the street corner, had discreetly struck away across Fifth Avenue It was the kind of masculine solidarity that he himself often practised; now he sickened at their connivance Did she really iine that he and she could live like this? And if not, what else did she iine?
"Tomorrow I must see you--somewhere where we can be alone," he said, in a voice that sounded alry to his own ears
She wavered, and e
"But I shall be at Granny's--for the present that is," she added, as if conscious that her change of plans required some explanation
"Somewhere where we can be alone," he insisted
She gave a faint laugh that grated on him
"In New York? But there are no churchesno monuments"
"There's the Art Museum--in the Park," he explained, as she looked puzzled "At half-past two I shall be at the door "
She turned aithout answering and got quickly into the carriage As it drove off she leaned forward, and he thought she waved her hand in the obscurity He stared after her in a turs It see not to the woman he loved but to another, a woman he was indebted to for pleasures already wearied of: it was hateful to find himself the prisoner of this hackneyed vocabulary
"She'll co the popular "Wolfe collection," whose anecdotic canvases filled one of the alleries of the queer wilderness of cast-iron and encaustic tiles known as the Metropolitan Museue to the room where the "Cesnola antiquities" mouldered in unvisited loneliness
They had this melancholy retreat to the the central stealass cabinets ments of Ilium
"It's odd," Madame Olenska said, "I never came here before"
"Ah, well-- Soreat Museum"
"Yes," she assented absently
She stood up and wandered across the rooht irlish even under its heavy furs, the cleverly planted heron wing in her fur cap, and the way a dark curl lay like a flattened vine spiral on each cheek above the ear His mind, as alhen they first met, holly absorbed in the delicious details that made her herself and no other Presently he rose and approached the case before which she stood Its glass shelves were croith snisable dolass, of clay, of discoloured bronze and other time-blurred substances