the head and hand
of her husband were lacking in the direction of her affairs, for which
she had hitherto shown the indifference of a Creole and the inaptitude
of a lackadaisical woman, she was determined to make no change in her
manner of living. At the period when Paul resolved to return to his
native town, Mademoiselle Natalie Evangelista was a remarkably beautiful
young girl, and, apparently, the richest match in Bordeaux, where the
steady diminution of her mother's capital was unknown. In order to
prolong her reign, Madame Evangelista had squandered enormous sums.
Brilliant fetes and the continuation of an almost regal style of living
kept the public in its past belief as to the wealth of the Spanish
family.

Natalie was now in her nineteenth year, but no proposal of marriage
had as yet reached her mother's ear. Accustomed to gratify her fancies,
Mademoiselle Evangelista wore cashmeres and jewels, and lived in a style
of luxury which alarmed all speculative suitors in a region and at a
period when sons were as calculating as their parents. The fatal remark,
"None but a prince can afford to marry Mademoiselle Evangelista,"
circulated among the salons and the cliques. Mothers of families,
dowagers who had granddaughters to establish, young girls jealous of
Natalie, whose elegance and tyrannical beauty annoyed them, took pains
to envenom this opinion with treacherous remarks. When they heard a
possible suitor say with ecstatic admiration, as Natalie entered a
ball-room, "Heavens, how beautiful she is!" "Yes," the mammas would
answer, "but expensive." If some new-comer thought Mademoiselle
Evangelista bewitching and said to a marriageable man that he couldn't
do it better, "Who would be bold enough," some woman would reply, "to
marry a girl whose mother gives her a thousand francs a month for her
toilet,--a girl who has horses and a maid of her own, and wears laces?
Yes, her 'peignoirs' are trimmed with mechlin. The price of her washing
would support the household of a clerk. She wears pelerines in the
morning which actually cost six francs to get up."

These, and other speeches said occasionally in the form of praise
extinguished the desires that some men might have had to marry the
beautiful Spanish girl. Queen of every ball, accustomed to flattery,
"blasee" with the smiles and the admiration which followed her every
step, Natalie, nevertheless, knew nothing of life. She lived as the
bird which flies, as the flower