"Some women have the luck of it," said Malaga's rival, "and I'm not
one of them,--though I do draw a third of the receipts."
Malaga wore pretty things, and occasionally "showed her head" (a term
in the lexicon of such characters) in the Bois, where the fashionable
young men of the day began to remark her. In fact, before long Malaga
was very much talked about in the questionable world of equivocal
women, who presently attacked her good fortune by calumnies. They said
she was a somnambulist, and the Pole was a magnetizer who was using
her to discover the philosopher's stone. Some even more envenomed
scandals drove her to a curiosity that was greater than Psyche's. She
reported them in tears to Paz.
"When I want to injure a woman," she said in conclusion, "I don't
calumniate her; I don't declare that some one magnetizes her to get
stones out of her, but I say plainly that she is humpbacked, and I
prove it. Why do you compromise me in this way?"
Paz maintained a cruel silence. Madame Chapuzot was not long in
discovering the name and title of Comte Paz; then she heard certain
positive facts at the hotel Laginski: for instance, that Paz was a
bachelor, and had never been known to have a daughter, alive or dead,
in Poland or in France. After that Malaga could not control a feeling
of terror.
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