ct
rouge or even powder. When they have not altogether discarded the
follies or the ennui of dress, but patronize their modiste
conscientiously, they have that "built up look" peculiar to those
uncompromisingly respectable women of the first society in our own
land, who frown upon the merely smart.

It is only the young women of fashion in France who make up lips,
brows, and cheeks, as well as hair and earlobes, who often look like
young clowns, and whose years give them no excuse for making up beyond
subservience to the mode of the hour.

It is even sadder when they are emulated by ambitious ladies in the
provinces. I went one day to a great concert--given for charity, of
course--in a town not far from Paris. The Mayor presided and his wife
was with him. As I had been taken out from Paris by one of the Patrons
I sat in the box with this very well-dressed and important young
woman, and she fascinated me so that I should have feared to appear
rude if she had not been far too taken up with the titled women from
Paris, whom she was meeting for the first time in her life, to pay any
attention to a mere American.

She may have been twenty-eight, certainly not over thirty, but she had
only one front tooth. It was a very large tooth and it stuck straight
out. Her lips were painted an energetic vermillion. Her mouth too was
large, and it spread across her dead white (and homely) face like a
malignant sore. She smiled constantly--it was her role to be gracious
to all these duchesses and ambassadresses--and that solitary tooth
darted forward like a sentinel on a bridge in the War Zone. But I
envied her. She was so happy. So important. I never met anybody who
made me feel so insignificant.

II

Madame d'Haussonville naturally suggests to the chronicler the
sharpest sort of contrasts.

I am told that she devoted herself to the world until the age of
fifty, and she wielded a power and received a measure of adulation
from both sexes that made her the most formidable social power in
France. But the De Broglies are a serious family, as their record in
history proves. Madame d'Haussonville, without renouncing her place in
the world of fashion, devoted herself more and more to good works, her
superior brain and executive abilities forcing her from year to year
into positions of heavier responsibility.

I was told that she was now seventy; but she is a woman whose
personality is so compelling that she rouses none of the usua