and guessed at their conversation, and gave the pair a broadside
of her eyes, an art acquired by Frenchwomen since the Peace, when
Englishwomen imported it into this country, together with the shape of
their silver plate, their horses and harness, and the piles of insular
ice which impart a refreshing coolness to the atmosphere of any room
in which a certain number of British females are gathered together.
The young men grew serious as a couple of clerks at the end of a
homily from headquarters before the receipt of an expected bonus.

The Duchess when she lost her heart to Victurnien had made up her mind
to play the part of romantic Innocence, a role much understudied
subsequently by other women, for the misfortune of modern youth. Her
Grace of Maufrigneuse had just come out as an angel at a moment's
notice, precisely as she meant to turn to literature and science
somewhere about her fortieth year instead of taking to devotion. She
made a point of being like nobody else. Her parts, her dresses, her
caps, opinions, toilettes, and manner of acting were all entirely new
and original. Soon after her marriage, when she was scarcely more than
a girl, she had played the part of a knowing and almost depraved
woman; she ventured on risky repartees with shallow people, and
betrayed her ignorance to those who knew better. As the date of that
marriage made it impossible to abstract one little year from her age
without the knowledge of Time, she had taken it into her head to be
immaculate. She scarcely seemed to belong to earth; she shook out her
wide sleeves as if they had been wings. Her eyes fled to heaven at too
warm a glance, or word, or thought.

There is a madonna painted by Piola, the great Genoese painter, who
bade fair to bring out a second edition of Raphael till his career was
cut short by jealousy and murder; his madonna, however, you may dimly
discern through a pane of glass in a little street in Genoa.

A more chaste-eyed madonna than Piola's does not exist but compared
with Mme. de Maufrigneuse, that heavenly creature was a Messalina.
Women wondered among themselves how such a giddy young thing had been
transformed by a change of dress into the fair veiled seraph who
seemed (to use an expression now in vogue) to have a soul as white as
new fallen snow on the highest Alpine crests. How had she solved in
such short space the Jesuitical problem how to display a bosom whiter
than her soul by hiding it in gauze? How co