herself at some garden-party or function of the sort, had represented
herself as a sister of my own to whom a maternal uncle had left a
fabulous fortune. She herself had suggested her being sheltered under my
aunt's roof as a singularly welcome "paying guest." She herself, too,
had suggested the visit to Paris and had hired the house from a
degenerate Duc de Luynes who preferred the delights of an _appartement_
in the less lugubrious Avenue Marceau.

"We have tastes so much in common," my aunt explained, as she moved away
to welcome a new arrival. I was left alone with the woman who called
herself my sister.

We stood a little apart. Each little group of talkers in the vast room
seemed to stand just without earshot of the next. I had my back to the
door, my face to her.

"And so you have come," she said, maliciously it seemed to me.

It was impossible to speak in _such_ a position; in such a place;
impossible to hold a discussion on family affairs when a diminutive
Irishwoman with too mobile eyebrows, and a couple of gigantic,
raw-boned, lugubrious Spaniards, were in a position to hear anything
that one uttered above a whisper. One might want to raise one's voice.
Besides, she was so--so terrible; there was no knowing what she might
not say. She so obviously did not care what the Irish or the Spaniards
or the Jesuits heard or thought, that I was forced to the mortifying
conclusion that I did.

"Oh, I've come," I answered. I felt as outrageously out of it as one
does at a suburban hop where one does not know one animal of the