Marizy.

"Which blonde! Why, there is but one this evening in the house. Opposite
to you, over there, in the first box, the Sainte Mesme's box. Look,
baroness, look straight over there--"

"Yes I am looking at her. She is atrociously got up, but pretty--"

"Pretty! She is a wonder! Simply a wonder! Got up? Yes, agreed--some
country relative. The Sainte Mesmes have cousins in Perigord. But what a
smile! How well her neck is set on! And the slope of the shoulders! Ah,
especially the shoulders!"

"Come, either keep still or go away. Let me listen to Mme. Caron--"

The prince went away, as no one knew that incomparable blonde. Yet she
had often been to the opera, but in an unpretentious way--in the second
tier of boxes. And to Prince Agenor above the first tier of boxes there
was nothing, absolutely nothing. There was emptiness--space. The prince
had never been in a second-tier box, so the second-tier boxes did not
exist.

While Mme. Caron was marvellously singing the marvellous phrase of
Reyer, "_O mon sauveur silencieux la Valkyrie est ta conquete_," the
prince strolled along the passages of the opera. Who was that blonde? He
wanted to know, and he would know.

And suddenly he remembered that good Mme. Picard was the box-opener of
the Sainte Mesmes, and that he, Prince of Nerins, had had the honor of
being for a long time a friend of that good Mme. Picard. It was she who
in the last years of the Second Empire had taught him bezique in all its
varieties--Japanese, Chinese, etc. He was then twenty, Mme. Picard was
forty. She was not then box-opener of the National Academy of Music; she
had in those times as office--and it was not a sinecure--the position of
aunt to a nice young person who showed a very pretty face and a very
pretty pair of legs in the chorus of the _revues_ of the Varietee. And
the prince, while quite young, at the beginning of his life, had, for
three or four years, led a peaceful, almost domestic life, with the aunt
and niece. Then they went off one way and he another.

One evening at the opera, ten years later, in handing his overcoat to a
venerable-looking old dame, Agenor heard himself saluted by the
following little speech:

"Ah, how happy I am to see you again, prince! And not changed--not at
all changed. Still the same, absolutely the same--still twenty."

It was Mme. Picard, who had been raised to the dignity of box-opener.
They chatted, talked of old times, and after that evening the pr