Peyrade, addressing Celeste, "the
strange protectress whom a friend of yours selected."

"Thank God," said Madame Thuillier. "Felix Phellion is above such vile
things."

"Ah ca! papa Minard, we'll keep quiet about all this; silence is the
word. Will you take a cup of tea?"

"Willingly," replied Minard.

"Celeste," said the old maid, "ring for Henri, and tell him to put the
large kettle on the fire."

Though the visit to the notary was not to be made till two in the
afternoon, Brigitte began early in the morning of the next day what
Thuillier called her _rampage_, a popular term which expresses that
turbulent, nagging, irritating activity which La Fontaine has described
so well in his fable of "The Old Woman and her Servants." Brigitte
declared that if you didn't take time by the forelock no one would be
ready. She prevented Thuillier from going to his office, insisting
that if he once got off she never should see him again; she plagued
Josephine, the cook, about hurrying the breakfast, and in spite of what
had happened the day before she scarcely restrained herself from nagging
at Madame Thuillier, who did not enter, as she thought she should have
done, into her favorite maxim, "Better be early than late."

Presently down she went to the Collevilles' to make the same
disturbance; and there she put her veto on the costume, far too elegant,
which Flavie meditated wearing, and told Celeste the hat and gown she
wished her to appear in. As for Colleville, who could not, he declared,
stay away all the morning from his official duties, she compelled him
to put on his dress-suit before he went out, made him set his watch by
hers, and warned him that if he was late no one would wait for him.

The amusing part of it was that Brigitte herself, after driving every
one at the point of the bayonet, came very near being late herself.
Under pretext of aiding others, independently of minding her own
business, which, for worlds, she would never have spared herself, she
had put her fingers and eyes into so many things that they ended by
overwhelming her. However, she ascribed the delay in which she was
almost caught to the hairdresser, whom she had sent for to make, on this
extraordinary occasion, what she called her "part." That artist having,
unadvisedly, dressed her hair in the fashion, he was compelled, after
she had looked at herself in the glass, to do his work over again, and
conform to the usual style of his client, which