A few days later, and another young lady--a tall, well-moulded
brunette, with dark hair and bright eyes--came to ask for M. Goriot.

"Three of them!" said Sylvie.

Then the second daughter, who had first come in the morning to see her
father, came shortly afterwards in the evening. She wore a ball dress,
and came in a carriage.

"Four of them!" commented Mme. Vauquer and her plump handmaid. Sylvie
saw not a trace of resemblance between this great lady and the girl in
her simple morning dress who had entered her kitchen on the occasion
of her first visit.

At that time Goriot was paying twelve hundred francs a year to his
landlady, and Mme. Vauquer saw nothing out of the common in the fact
that a rich man had four or five mistresses; nay, she thought it very
knowing of him to pass them off as his daughters. She was not at all
inclined to draw a hard-and-fast line, or to take umbrage at his
sending for them to the Maison Vauquer; yet, inasmuch as these visits
explained her boarder's indifference to her, she went so far (at the
end of the second year) as to speak of him as an "ugly old wretch."
When at length her boarder declined to nine hundred francs a year, she
asked him very insolently what he took her house to be, after meeting
one of these ladies on the stairs. Father Goriot answered that the
lady was his eldest daughter.

"So you have two or three dozen daughters, have you?" said Mme.
Vauquer sharply.