Madame de Nailles pretty freely. As they crossed the Parc Monceau to
reach their carriage, which was waiting for them on the Boulevard
Malesherbes, they made the young people, Giselle and Fred, walk ahead,
that they might have an opportunity of expressing themselves freely, the
old dowager especially, whose toothless mouth never lost an opportunity
of smirching the character and the reputation of her neighbors.

"When I think of the pains my poor cousin de Nailles took to impress upon
us all that he was making what is called a 'mariage raisonnable'! Well,
if a man wants a wife who is going to set up her own notions, her own
customs, he had better marry a poor girl without fortune! This one will
simply ruin him. My dear, I am continually amazed at the way people are
living whose incomes I know to the last sou. What an example for
Jacqueline! Extravagance, fast living, elegant self-indulgence....
Did you observe the Baronne's gown?--of rough woolen stuff. She told
some one it was the last creation of Doucet, and you know what that
implies! His serge costs more than one of our velvet gowns . . . .
And then her artistic tastes, her bric-a brac! Her salon looks like a
museum or a bazaar. I grant you it makes a very pretty setting for her
and all her coquetries. But in my time respectable women were contented
with furniture covered with red or yellow silk damask furnished by their
upholsterers. They didn't go about trying to hunt up the impossible.
'On ne cherche pas midi a quatorze heures'. You hold, as I do, to the
old fashions, though you are not nearly so old, my dear Elise, and
Jacqueline's mother thought as we think. She would say that her daughter
is being very badly brought up. To be sure, all young creatures nowadays
are the same. Parents, on a plea of tenderness, keep them at home, where
they get spoiled among grown people, when they had much better have the
same kind of education that has succeeded so well with Giselle; bolts on
the garden-gates, wholesome seclusion, the company of girls of their own