Madame Schontz, anxious to appear both young and beautiful, armed
herself with a toilet which that sort of woman has the art of making.
She wore a guipure pelerine of spidery texture, a gown of blue velvet,
the graceful corsage of which was buttoned with opals, and her hair in
bands as smooth and shining as ebony. Madame Schontz owed her
celebrity as a pretty woman to the brilliancy and freshness of a
complexion as white and warm as that of Creoles, to a face full of
spirited details, the features of which were clearly and firmly drawn,
--a type long presented in perennial youth by the Comtesse Merlin, and
which is perhaps peculiar to Southern races. Unhappily, little Madame
Schontz had tended towards ebonpoint ever since her life had become so
happy and calm. Her neck, of exquisite roundness, was beginning to
take on flesh about the shoulders; but in France the heads of women
are principally treasured; so that fine heads will often keep an
ill-formed body unobserved.

"My dear child," said Maxime, coming in and kissing Madame Schontz on
the forehead, "Rochefide wanted me to see your establishment; why, it
is almost in keeping with his four hundred thousand francs a year.
Well, well, he would never have had them if he hadn't known you. In
less than five years you have made him save what others--Antonia,
Malaga, Cadine, or Florentine--would have made him lose."

"I am not a lorette, I am an artist," said Madame Schontz, with a sort
of dignity, "I hope to end, as they say on the stage, as the
progenitrix of honest men."

"It is dreadful, but we are all marrying," returned Maxime, throwing
himself into an arm-chair beside the fire. "Here am I, on the point of