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f. But after storm comes sunshine: and I am happily assured by her less despairing appearance, and by the new mourning that I have been making for her, that even now, from the bottomless depth of her affliction, she looks beyond the storm." "I well believe it!" snapped Madame Vic. "That the appearance of Madame Jolicoeur at any time has been despairing is a matter that has escaped my notice. As to the mourning that she now wears, it is a defiance of all propriety. Why, with no more than that of colour in her frock"--Madame Vic upheld her thumb and finger infinitesimally separated--"and with a mere pin-point of a flower in her bonnet, she would be fit for the opera!" Madame Vic spoke with a caustic bitterness that had its roots. Her own venture in second marriage had been catastrophic--so catastrophic that her neglected bakery had gone very much to the bad. Still more closely to the point, Madame Jolicoeur--incident to finding entomologic specimens misplaced in her breakfast-rolls--had taken the leading part in an interchange of incivilities with the bakery's proprietor, and had withdrawn from it her custom. "And even were her mournings not a flouting of her short year of widowhood," continued Madame Vic, with an acrimony that abbreviated the term of widowhood most unfairly--"the scores of eligible suitors who openly come streaming to her door, and are welcomed there, are as trumpets proclaiming her audacious intentions and her indecorous desires. Even Monsieur Brisson is in that outrageous procession! Is it not enough that she should entice a repulsively bald-headed notary and an old rake of a major to make their brazen advances, without suffering this anatomy of a pharmacien to come treading on their heels?--he with his hands imbrued in the life-blood of the unhappy old woman whom his mismade prescription sent in agony to the tomb! Pah! I have no patience with her! She and her grief and her seclusion and her sympathetic cat, indeed! It all is a tragedy of indiscretion--that shapes itself as a revolting farce!" It will be observed that Madame Vic, in framing her bill of particulars, practically reduced her alleged scores of Madame Jolicoeur's suitors to precisely two--since the bad third was handicapped so heavily by that notorious matter of the mismade prescription as to be a negligible quantity, quite out of the race. Indeed, it was only the preposterous temerity of Monsieur Brisson--despairingly clutching at
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