reserve a distant and glacial manner which
should remind everyone present that she had no desire to remain on
friendly terms with a person in whose house one might find oneself, any
day, cheek by jowl with the Princesse Mathilde, and to whom it was not
her duty to make advances since she was not 'of her generation,'
she felt bound to modify this air of dignity and reserve by some
non-committal remark which would justify her overture and would force
the Princess to engage in conversation; and so, when she reached her
cousin, Mme. de Gallardon, with a stern countenance and one hand thrust
out as though she were trying to 'force' a card, began with: "How is
your husband?" in the same anxious tone that she would have used if the
Prince had been seriously ill. The Princess, breaking into a laugh which
was one of her characteristics, and was intended at once to shew the
rest of an assembly that she was making fun of some one and also to
enhance her own beauty by concentrating her features around her animated
lips and sparkling eyes, answered: "Why; he's never been better in his
life!" And she went on laughing.

Mme. de Gallardon then drew herself up and, chilling her expression
still further, perhaps because she was still uneasy about the Prince's
health, said to her cousin:

"Oriane," (at once Mme. des Laumes looked with amused astonishment
towards an invisible third, whom she seemed to call to witness that she
had never authorised Mme. de Gallardon to use her Christian name) "I
should be so pleased if you would look in, just for a minute, to-morrow
evening, to hear a quintet, with the clarinet, by Mozart. I should like
to have your opinion of it."

She seemed not so much to be issuing an invitation as to be asking
favour, and to want the Princess's opinion of the Mozart quintet just
though it had been a dish invented by a new cook, whose talent it was
most important that an epicure should come to judge.

"But I know that quintet quite well. I can tell you now--that I adore
it."

"You know, my husband isn't at all well; it's his liver. He would like
so much to see you," Mme. de Gallardon resumed, making it now a corporal
work of charity for the Princess to appear at her party.

The Princess never liked to tell people that she would not go to their
houses. Every day she would write to express her regret at having
been kept away--by the sudden arrival of her husband's mother, by an
invitation from his brother, by the Op