Newman stared, and after this he ceased to talk politics with M.de Bellegarde.

He was not horrified nor scandalized, he was not even amused; he felt as he should have felt if he had discovered in M.de Bellegarde a taste for certain oddities of diet; an appetite, for instance, for fishbones or nutshells.

Under these circumstances, of course, he would never have broached dietary questions with him.
One afternoon, on his calling on Madame de Cintre, Newman was requested by the servant to wait a few moments, as his hostess was not at liberty.
He walked about the room a while, taking up her books, smelling her flowers, and looking at her prints and photographs (which he thought prodigiously pretty), and at last he heard the opening of a door to which his back was turned.

On the threshold stood an old woman whom he remembered to have met several times in entering and leaving the house.
She was tall and straight and dressed in black, and she wore a cap which, if Newman had been initiated into such mysteries, would have been a sufficient assurance that she was not a Frenchwoman; a cap of pure British composition.

She had a pale, decent, depressed-looking face, and a clear, dull, English eye.