" Was Madame de Fondege speaking sincerely? There could
be no doubt of it. Her features, which had been distorted with
anger when the General took it into his head to order the bottle
of Bordeaux, had regained their usual placidity of expression, and
had even brightened a little. "I am entirely at your service, my
dear, if you wish any shopping done," she continued. "And if you
are not quite pleased with your dressmaker, I will take you to
mine, who works like an angel. But how absurd I am. You will of
course employ Van Klopen. I go to him occasionally myself, but
only on great occasions. Between you and me, I think him a trifle
too high in his charges."
Mademoiselle Marguerite could scarcely repress a smile. "I must
confess, madame, that from my infancy I have been in the habit of
making almost all my dresses myself."
The General's wife raised her eyes to Heaven in real or feigned
astonishment. "Yourself!" she repeated four or five times, as if
to make sure that she had heard aright. "Yourself! That is
incomprehensible! You, the daughter of a man who possessed an
income of five or six hundred thousand francs a year! Still I know
that poor M. de Chalusse, though unquestionably a very worthy and
excellent man, was peculiar in some of his ideas."
"Excuse me, madame. What I did, I did for my own pleasure."
But this assertion exceeded Madame de Fondege's powers of
comprehension.
Pages:
164
165
166
167
168
169
170
171
172
173
174
175
176
177
178
179
180
181
182
183
184
185
186
187
188