ed eyes, on the other a tumultuous
springtime of bright colors, expansive waists, diamonds in profusion,
floating sashes, styles for exportation, wherein one could detect a sort
of regretful longing for a warmer climate and a luxurious, ostentatious
life. Fans waving majestically here, discreet whispering there. Very few
men, two or three youths, very thoughtful, silent and inactive, sucking
the heads of their canes, several stooping figures, standing behind
their wives' broad backs, talking with their heads lowered as if they
were discussing smuggling expeditions; in a corner the beautiful,
patriarchal beard and violet hood of an orthodox Armenian bishop.

The baroness, in her efforts to bring these discordant social elements
together and to keep her salons full until the famous interview,
constantly moved about, carried on ten different conversations at once,
raising her soft, melodious voice to the purring pitch that
distinguishes Oriental women,--a wheedling, seductive voice, and a mind
as supple as her waist, opening all sorts of subjects, and, as
convention requires, mingling fashions and sermons on charity, theatres
and auction sales,--the scandalmonger and the confessor. She possessed a
great personal charm in addition to this acquired science of
entertaining, a science visible even in her very simple black dress,
which brought out in relief her cloistral pallor, her houri-like eyes,
her smooth, glossy hair, parted above a narrow, unwrinkled brow,--a brow
whose mystery was accentuated by the too thin lips, closing to the
curious the whole varied, adventurous past of that ex-odalisque, who was
of no age, had no knowledge of the date of her birth, did not remember
that she had ever been a child.

Clearly, if the absolute power of evil, very rarely found in women, whom
their impressionable physical nature subjects to so many varying
currents, could exist in a human soul, it would be found in the soul of
that slave trained to concessions and fawning, rebellious but patient,
and thoroughly self-controlled, like all those whom the habit of wearing
a veil lowered over their eyes has accustomed to lying without danger
and without scruple.

At that moment no one could have suspected the agony of suspense from
which she was suffering, to see her kneeling in front of the princess, a
good-humored old woman, of unceremonious manners, of whom La Fuernberg
constantly said: "Well, if she's a princess!"

"Oh! godmother, don'