gliness--it
was a gold-mine of charm--had two opinions about her: one of which was
that she knew a hundred times less than she thought, and even than her
brother thought, of what she talked about; and the other that she was
after all not such a humbug as she seemed. She passed in her family
for a rank radical, a bold Bohemian; she picked up expressions out
of newspapers and at the petits theatres, but her hands and feet were
celebrated, and her behaviour was not. That of her sisters, as well, had
never been disastrously exposed.

"But she must be charming, your young lady," she said to Gaston while
she turned her head this way and that as she stood before Francie's
image. "She's a little Renaissance statuette cast in silver, something
of Jean Goujon or Germain Pilon." The young men exchanged a glance, for
this struck them as the happiest comparison, and Gaston replied in a
detached way that the girl was well worth seeing.

He went in to have a cup of tea with his sister on the day he knew she
would have paid her second visit to the studio, and the first words she
greeted him with were: "But she's admirable--votre petite--admirable,
admirable!" There was a lady calling in the Place Beauvau at the
moment--old Mme. d'Outreville--who naturally asked for news of the
object of such enthusiasm. Gaston suffered Susan to answer all questions
and was attentive to her account of the new beauty. She described his
young friend almost as well as he would have done, from the point of
view of her type, her graces, her plastic value, using various technical
and critical terms to which the old lady listened in silence, solemnly,
rather coldly, as if she thought such talk much of a galimatias:
she belonged to the old-fashioned school and held a pretty person
sufficiently catalogued when it had been said she had a dazzling
complexion or the finest eyes in the world.

"Qu'est-ce que c'est que cette merveille?" she enquired; to which Mme.
de Brecourt made answer that it was a little American her brother had
somewhere dug up. "And what do you propose to do with it, may one ask?"
Mme. d'Outreville demanded, looking at Gaston with an eye that seemed to
read his secret and that brought him for half a minute to the point of
breaking out: "I propose to marry it--there!" But he contained himself,
only pleading for the present his wish to ascertain the uses to which
she was adapted; meanwhile, he added, there was nothing he so much liked
as to lo