xiou's
wit, Finot's shrewdness, Maxime's profound diplomacy, and Leon de Lora's
genius.

Madame Schontz, anxious to appear both young and beautiful, armed
herself with a toilet which that sort of woman has the art of making.
She wore a guipure pelerine of spidery texture, a gown of blue velvet,
the graceful corsage of which was buttoned with opals, and her hair in
bands as smooth and shining as ebony. Madame Schontz owed her celebrity
as a pretty woman to the brilliancy and freshness of a complexion as
white and warm as that of Creoles, to a face full of spirited details,
the features of which were clearly and firmly drawn,--a type long
presented in perennial youth by the Comtesse Merlin, and which is
perhaps peculiar to Southern races. Unhappily, little Madame Schontz
had tended towards ebonpoint ever since her life had become so happy and
calm. Her neck, of exquisite roundness, was beginning to take on flesh
about the shoulders; but in France the heads of women are principally
treasured; so that fine heads will often keep an ill-formed body
unobserved.

"My dear child," said Maxime, coming in and kissing Madame Schontz on
the forehead, "Rochefide wanted me to see your establishment; why, it
is almost in keeping with his four hundred thousand francs a year. Well,
well, he would never have had them if he hadn't known you. In less than
five years you have made him save what others--Antonia, Malaga, Cadine,
or Florentine--would have made him lose."

"I am not a lorette, I am an artist," said Madame Schontz, with a sort
of dignity, "I hope to end, as they say on the stage, as the progenitrix
of honest men."

"It is dreadful, but we are all marrying," returned Maxime, throwing
himself into an arm-chair beside the fire. "Here am I, on the point of
making a Comtesse Maxime."

"Oh, how I should like to see her!" exclaimed Madame Schontz. "But
permit me to present to you Monsieur Claude Vignon--Monsieur Claude
Vignon, Monsieur de Trailles."

"Ah, so you are the man who allowed Camille Maupin, the innkeeper of
literature, to go into a convent?" cried Maxime. "After you, God. I
never received such an honor. Mademoiselle des Touches treated you,
monsieur, as though you were Louis XIV."

"That is how history is written!" replied Claude Vignon. "Don't you know
that her fortune was used to free the Baron du Guenic's estates? Ah! if
she only knew that Calyste now belongs to her ex-friend," (Maxime pushed
the critic's foot, m