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n after by her set as Jean Laparde! Fancy! Only thirty, a bachelor--and already the leader of his political party! Yes, decidedly, besides being amazingly handsome and amazingly brilliant, Paul was a figure in France! The man was passionately, madly in love with her; and so was Jean--which went without saying! Imagine! The two lions of social Paris! Nothing, not an affair, was complete without them--and she had only to lift a finger as to two slaves! Therefore social Paris was utterly and completely under her domination. She, literally, was Paris. It was very plain! So long as she exercised a proprietorship over both of them, Paris was at her feet. It was not a question of choice between them--not at all. Jean was the lion, so much so that she could even hold court with Jean alone; but with both, her position was impregnable. The trouble was--her brows puckered into anxious little furrows--that at the first opportunity Paul would renew the attack. It was very nice to have Paris at one's feet, but it was quite another matter to keep it there. Paul, of course, was the more difficult of the two to keep in hand. Jean, because he had never seemed to shake off entirely that diffidence toward her born of Bernay-sur-Mer, she had so far been able to manage quite simply, only--her eyes shifted from the chauffeur's back to the toe of her shoe, and her foot ceased its petulant tapping on the floor--that was the other incident of last night. It had happened just after the arrival of the President. Jean had sought her out. She remembered the heightened colour in his cheeks, the sort of nervous brilliance in his eyes. He had been drunk--drunk with the wealth, the glamour, the power that was his; intoxicated with the fame, the adulation, the triumph of the moment. He was a glutton for that--for fame. There was very little else that mattered to Jean. He was the supreme type of egoist. She could dissect Jean very coolly and with precision, she thought. "The studio, to-morrow afternoon at five, Myrna--don't fail," he had said--and had passed on. There had been a certain air of authority in his tones--to which she had promptly taken exception, and to which, in an annoying and persistent way, she still took exception. Furthermore, it conveyed a possible, and alarming hint that his docility perhaps was wearing thin. Well, that would never do at all! She was going, of course, to the studio now---but she would t
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