Page 298 - the-portrait-of-a-lady

Luce, an old friend of Mrs. Touchett’s and the only person
in Paris she now went to see. Mrs. Luce had been living in
Paris since the days of Louis Philippe; she used to say jo-
cosely that she was one of the generation of 1830—a joke of
which the point was not always taken. When it failed Mrs.
Luce used to explain—‘Oh yes, I’m one of the romantics”;
her French had never become quite perfect. She was always
at home on Sunday afternoons and surrounded by sym-
pathetic compatriots, usually the same. In fact she was at
home at all times, and reproduced with wondrous truth in
her well-cushioned little corner of the brilliant city, the do-
mestic tone of her native Baltimore. This reduced Mr. Luce,
her worthy husband, a tall, lean, grizzled, well-brushed gen-
tleman who wore a gold eye-glass and carried his hat a little
too much on the back of his head, to mere platonic praise of
the ‘distractions’ of Paris—they were his great word—since
you would never have guessed from what cares he escaped to
them. One of them was that he went every day to the Ameri-
can banker’s, where he found a post-office that was almost
as sociable and colloquial an institution as in an American
country town. He passed an hour (in fine weather) in a chair
in the Champs Elysees, and he dined uncommonly well at
his own table, seated above a waxed floor which it was Mrs.
Luce’s happiness to believe had a finer polish than any other
in the French capital. Occasionally he dined with a friend or
two at the Cafe Anglais, where his talent for ordering a din-
ner was a source of felicity to his companions and an object
of admiration even to the headwaiter of the establishment.
These were his only known pastimes, but they had beguiled

298 The Portrait of a Lady