To please him Clytie went with him a little into society. He was proud of his beautiful wife, loved to watch the effect produced as she entered a drawing-room upon his arm, and the eager admiration on the faces of the men who crowded round her chair. In fact, Clytie had a small social success--and a paragraph in the _Figaro_. It was a new sensation for her; but in these early days of her married life she would have preferred a quieter, less conspicuous existence. But Thornton, just as he had sought in the south to keep her and her beauty to himself, now seemed to wish to exhibit it abroad.
“I seem to wear you like a decoration, darling,” he said once.
At first Clytie flushed with pleasure at the little flattery. Then she thought over it for a bit, and it did not please her so much. But she did not confide this to her husband. She had already begun to discover that for the safekeeping of many little matters her own heart was the best place.
They had a set of rooms in a hotel in the Champs Elysées with a balcony overlooking the Grande Avenue. Clytie loved to sit there with Thornton in the quiet half hour before dinner watching the stream of vehicles, fine and vague far away by the Arc de Triomphe, then gradually broadening, till fashionable Paris returning from the Bois blazed beneath her in its movement and gaiety. They seemed to her so alone up there, above the whirl and the glitter and falseness. It was a return of the hours of the month in the south, and happiness fluttered tremulously around her--like a butterfly, ever so elusively. When she leaned over the balcony by his side many people looked up admiringly at them. When she saw one woman twitch the arm of her companion in a victoria, and both shoot swift feminine glances up at the balcony, she could not help feeling a little thrill of pride in her husband. And then she would remember the morning's solitary ramble among the sculpture of the Louvre (Thornton and herself were less dependent upon each other now for entertainment), and reflect, with a sense of pleasure, that she had seen no antique ideal that could compare with him in splendid manhood. He, too, had done heroic deeds, she would think, and she would move nearer to his side and be glad that he was there. Yet the butterfly happiness was just beyond her grasp.