Valerie's waist and kissing her forehead. "I enjoy all your pleasures,
your good fortune, your dresses--I never really lived till the day
when we became sisters."

"Wait a moment, my tiger-cat!" cried Valerie, laughing; "your shawl is
crooked. You cannot put a shawl on yet in spite of my lessons for
three years--and you want to be Madame la Marechale Hulot!"

Shod in prunella boots, over gray silk stockings, in a gown of
handsome corded silk, her hair in smooth bands under a very pretty
black velvet bonnet, lined with yellow satin, Lisbeth made her way to
the Rue Saint-Dominique by the Boulevard des Invalides, wondering
whether sheer dejection would at last break down Hortense's brave
spirit, and whether Sarmatian instability, taken at a moment when,
with such a character, everything is possible, would be too much for
Steinbock's constancy.



Hortense and Wenceslas had the ground floor of a house situated at the
corner of the Rue Saint-Dominique and the Esplanade des Invalides.
These rooms, once in harmony with the honeymoon, now had that
half-new, half-faded look that may be called the autumnal aspect of
furniture. Newly married folks are as lavish and wasteful, without
knowing it or intending it, of everything about them as they are of
their affection. Thinking only of themselves, they reck little of the
future, which, at a later time, weighs on the mother of a family.

Lisbeth found Hortense just as she had finished dressing a baby
Wenceslas, who had been carried into the garden.