married her on her exit
from that second seraglio, but was unable to induce society to receive
her in Tunis, where no woman, be she Moor, Turk, or European, will ever
consent to treat a former slave as an equal, by virtue of a prejudice
not unlike that which separates the Creole from the most perfectly
disguised quadroon. There is an invincible repugnance there on that
subject, which the Hemerlingue family found even in Paris, where the
foreign colonies form little clubs overflowing with local
susceptibilities and traditions. Thus Yumina passed two or three years
in utter solitude, of which she was able to turn to good account all the
bitterness of heart and all the leisure hours; for she was an ambitious
woman of extraordinary strength of will and obstinacy. She learned the
French language thoroughly, said adieu forever to her embroidered
jackets and pink silk trousers, succeeded in adapting her figure and her
gait to European garb, to the embarrassment of long skirts; and one
evening, at the opera, displayed to the marvelling Parisians the figure,
still a little uncivilized, but elegant, refined and so original, of a
female Mussulman in a decollete costume by Leonard.

The sacrifice of her religion followed close upon that of her costume.
Madame Hemerlingue had long since abandoned all Mohammedan practices,
when Maitre Le Merquier, the intimate friend of the family and her
cicerone in Paris, pointed out that a formal conversion of the baroness
would open to her the doors of that portion of Parisian society which
seems to have become more and more difficult of access, in proportion as
the society all around it has become more democratic. Faubourg
Saint-Germain once conquered, all the rest would follow. And so it
proved that when, after the sensation occasioned by the baptism, it
became known that the greatest names of France did not disdain to
assemble at Baroness Hemerlingue's Saturdays, Mesdames Guggenheim,
Fuernberg, Caraiscaki, Maurice Trott, all wives of Fez millionaires and
illustrious in the market-places of Tunis, renounced their prejudices
and prayed to be admitted to the ex-slave's receptions. Madame Jansoulet
alone, newly landed in France with a stock of Oriental ideas impeding
circulation in her mind, as her nargileh, her ostrich eggs and all the
rest of her Tunisian trash impeded it in her apartments, protested
against what she called impropriety, cowardice, and declared that she
would never step foot insi