s old! The beautiful Duchess Antonia, whose neck and shoulders were
the despair of Paris! Utterly incredible! 'Tclk! tclk!' He pictured
her at Mousseaux last summer, rising earlier than any of her guests,
wandering with her dogs in the park while the dew was still on the
ground, with loosened hair and blooming lips; she did not look made up,
not a bit. Fifty-three years old? Impossible!

'Tclk, tclk! Hi! Hi!' That's a nasty corner between the Rond Pont and
the Avenue d'Antin.--All the same, it was a low trick they were playing
her, to find a wife for the Prince. For let his mother say what she
would, the Duchess and her drawing-room had been a fine thing for them
all. Perhaps his father might never have been in the Academie but
for her; he himself owed her all his commissions. Then there was the
succession to Loisillon's place and the prospect of the fine rooms under
the cupola--well, there was nothing like a woman for flinging you over.
Not that men were any better; the Prince d'Athis, for instance. To think
what the Duchess had done for him! When they met he was a ruined and
penniless rip; now what was he? High in the diplomatic service, member
of the Academie des Sciences Morales et Politiques, on account of a book
not a word of which he had written himself, 'The Mission of Woman in
the World'. And while the Duchess was busily at work to fit him with an
Embassy, he was only waiting to be gazetted before taking French
leave and playing off this dirty trick on her, after fifteen years of
uninterrupted happiness. 'The mission of woman in the world!' Well, the
Prince understood what the mission of woman was. The next thing was to
better the lesson. 'Tclk! tclk! Gate, please.'

Paul's soliloquy was over, and his cart drew up before a mansion in the
Rue de Courcelles. The double gates were rolled, back slowly and heavily
as if accomplishing a task to which they had long been unused.

In this house lived the Princess Colette de Rosen, who had shut herself
up in the complete seclusion of mourning since the sad occurrence
which had made her a widow at twenty-six. The daily papers recorded the
details of the young widow's sensational despair: how the fair hair was
cut off close and thrown into the coffin; how her room was decorated as
for a lying in state; how she took her meals alone with two places laid,
while on the table in the anteroom lay as usual the Prince's walking
stick, hat, and gloves, as though he were at home an