success of Charretier's Corn Plasters."

"He must know some nice people, since he knows relations of yours."

"Thank you for the compliment, which I hope you pay me on circumstantial
evidence. But it's deceiving. My mother, I believe, was the only nice
person in her family. These cousins, husband and wife, brought mamma to
Europe to live with them when she was a young girl, quite rich and an
orphan. They were furious when she fell in love with papa, who was only
a lieutenant with nothing but a very old name, the ruins of a castle
that tourists paid francs to see, and a ramshackle house in Paris almost
too dilapidated to let. It was a mere detail to them that he happened to
be one of the best-looking and most agreeable young men in the world.
They did nothing but say, 'I told you so!' for years, whenever anything
disastrous happened--as it constantly did, for poor papa and mamma loved
each other so much, and had so much fun, that they couldn't have time
to be business-like. My cousins thought everything mamma did was a
madness--such as sending me to the most fashionable convent school in
France. As if I hadn't to be educated! And then, when the castle fell so
to bits that tourists wouldn't bother with it any more, and nobody but
rats would live in the Paris house unless it was repaired--and poor papa
was killed in a horrid little Saturday-to-Monday war of no importance
(except to people whose hearts it broke)--oh! I believe the cousins were
glad! They thought it was a judgment. That happened years ago, when I
was only fifteen, and though they've plenty of money (more than most
people in the American colony) they didn't offer to help; and mamma
would have died sooner than ask. I had to be snatched out of school, to
find that all the beautiful dreams of being a happy _débutante_ must go
by contraries. We lived in the tumble-down house ourselves, mamma and I,
and her friends rallied round her--she was so popular and pretty. They