"Oh, you are very ambitious," answered the old lady.
"Yes, I confess I am," said Newman, smiling.
Madame de Bellegarde looked at him with her cold fine eyes, and he
returned her gaze, reflecting that she was a possible adversary and
trying to take her measure. Their eyes remained in contact for some
moments. Then Madame de Bellegarde looked away, and without smiling, "I
am very ambitious, too," she said.
Newman felt that taking her measure was not easy; she was a formidable,
inscrutable little woman. She resembled her daughter, and yet she was
utterly unlike her. The coloring in Madame de Cintre was the same, and
the high delicacy of her brow and nose was hereditary. But her face was
a larger and freer copy, and her mouth in especial a happy divergence
from that conservative orifice, a little pair of lips at once plump and
pinched, that looked, when closed, as if they could not open wider than
to swallow a gooseberry or to emit an "Oh, dear, no!" which probably had
been thought to give the finishing touch to the aristocratic prettiness
of the Lady Emmeline Atheling as represented, forty years before, in
several Books of Beauty. Madame de Cintre's face had, to Newman's eye,
a range of expression as delightfully vast as the wind-streaked,
cloud-flecked distance on a Western prairie.
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