her to sew, on the plea
that she was as skilful with her fingers as a fairy, but in reality that
her employer might feel the superiority of her own position.

Hitherto Miss Nora had been delighted to meet at watering-places a
friend of whom she could say proudly, "She is a representative of the
old nobility of France" (which was not true, by the way, for the title
of Baron borne by M. de Nailles went no farther back than the days of
Louis XVIII); and she was still more proud to think that she was now
waited on by this same daughter of a nobleman, when her own father had
kept a drinking-saloon. She did not acknowledge this feeling to herself,
and would certainly have maintained that she never had had such an idea,
but it existed all the same, and she was under its influence, being very
vain and rather foolish. And, indeed, Jacqueline, would have been very
willing to plan trimmings and alter finery from morning to night in
her own chamber in a hotel, exactly as Mademoiselle Justine did, if she
could by this means have escaped the special duties of her difficult
position, which duties were to follow Miss Nora everywhere, like her own
shadow, to be her confidant and to act sometimes as her screen, or even
as her accomplice, in matters that occasionally involved risks, and were
never to her liking.

The young American girl had already said to her father, when he asked
her to give up her search for an entirely satisfactory European suitor,
which search he feared might drag on forever without any results: "Oh!
I shall be sure to find him at Bellagio!" And she made up her mind that
there he was to be sought and found at any price. Hotel life offered her
opportunities to exercise her instincts for flirtation, for there she
met many specimens of men she called chic, with a funny little foreign
accent, which seemed to put new life into the wornout word. Twenty times
a day she baited her hook, and twenty times a day some fish would
bite, or at least nibble, according as he was a fortune-hunter or a
dilettante. Miss Nora, being incapable of knowing the difference, was
ready to capture good or bad, and went about dragging her slaves at
her chariot-wheels. Sometimes she took them rowing, with the Stars and
Stripes floating over her boat, by moonlight; sometimes she drove
them recklessly in a drag through roads bordered by olive-groves and
vineyards; all these expeditions being undertaken under-pretence of
admiring the romantic scene