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After a week in London they went to Paris. The exhibition of Keniston’s pictures had been opened a few days earlier; and as they drove through the streets on the way to the station an “impressionist” poster here and there invited them to the display of the American artist’s work. Mrs. Davant, who had been in Paris for the opening, had already written rapturously of the impression produced, enclosing commendatory notices from one or two papers. She reported that there had been a great crowd on the first day, and that the critics had been “immensely struck.”

The Kenistons arrived in the evening, and the next morning Claudia, as a matter of course, asked her husband at what time he meant to go and see the pictures.

He looked up absently from his guide-book.

“What pictures?”

“Why–yours,” she said, surprised.

“Oh, they’ll keep,” he answered; adding with a slightly embarrassed laugh, “We’ll give the other chaps a show first.” Presently he laid down his book and proposed that they should go to the Louvre.

They spent the morning there, lunched at a restaurant near by, and returned to the gallery in the afternoon. Keniston had passed from inarticulateness to an eager volubility. It was clear that he was beginning to co-ordinate his impressions, to find his way about in a corner of the great imaginative universe. He seemed extraordinarily ready to impart his discoveries; and Claudia felt that her ignorance served him as a convenient buffer against the terrific impact of new sensations.

On the way home she asked when he meant to see Mrs. Davant.

His answer surprised her. “Does she know we’re here?”

“Not unless you’ve sent her word,” said Claudia, with a touch of harmless irony.

“That’s all right, then,” he returned simply. “I want to wait and look about a day or two longer. She’d want us to go sight-seeing with her; and I’d rather get my impressions alone.”

The next two days were hampered by the necessity of eluding Mrs. Davant. Claudia, under different circumstances, would have scrupled to share in this somewhat shabby conspiracy; but she found herself in a state of suspended judgment, wherein her husband’s treatment of Mrs. Davant became for the moment merely a clue to larger meanings.

They had been four days in Paris when Claudia, returning one afternoon from a parenthetical excursion to the Rue de la Paix, was confronted on her threshold by the reproachful figure of their benefactress. It was not to her, however, that Mrs. Davant’s reproaches were addressed. Keniston, it appeared, had borne the brunt of them; for he stood leaning against the mantelpiece of their modest salon in that attitude of convicted negligence when, if ever, a man is glad to take refuge behind his wife.

Claudia had however no immediate intention of affording him such shelter. She wanted to observe and wait.

“He’s too impossible!” cried Mrs. Davant, sweeping her at once into the central current of her grievance.

Claudia looked from one to the other.

“For not going to see you?”

“For not going to see his pictures!” cried the other nobly.

Claudia colored and Keniston shifted his position uneasily.

“I can’t make her understand,” he said, turning to his wife.

“I don’t care about myself!” Mrs. Davant interjected.

“I do, then; it’s the only thing I do care about,” he hurriedly protested. “I meant to go at once–to write–Claudia wanted to go, but I wouldn’t let her.” He looked helplessly about the pleasant red-curtained room, which was rapidly burning itself into Claudia’s consciousness as a visible extension of Mrs. Davant’s claims.

“I can’t explain,” he broke off.

Mrs. Davant in turn addressed herself to Claudia.

“People think it’s so odd,” she complained. “So many of the artists here are anxious to meet him; they’ve all been so charming about the pictures; and several of our American friends have come over from London expressly for the exhibition. I told every one that he would be here for the opening–there was a private view, you know–and they were so disappointed–they wanted to give him an ovation; and I didn’t know what to say. What am I to say?” she abruptly ended.