"To ask leave? That's it-to humble myself again for a few paltry
chrysanthemums and two or three bits of green. Besides, I didn't make
any secret of taking the flowers; and when she comes up a little later--"

"Is she coming? Ah! that's very kind of her."

Sidonie turned upon him indignantly.

"What's that? Kind of her? Upon my word, if she doesn't come, it would
be the last straw. When I go every Wednesday to be bored to death in her
salon with a crowd of affected, simpering women!"

She did not say that those same Wednesdays of Madame Fromont's were very
useful to her, that they were like a weekly journal of fashion, one of
those composite little publications in which you are told how to enter
and to leave a room, how to bow, how to place flowers in a jardiniere and
cigars in a case, to say nothing of the engravings, the procession of
graceful, faultlessly attired men and women, and the names of the best
modistes. Nor did Sidonie add that she had entreated all those friends
of Claire's, of whom she spoke so scornfully, to come to see her on her
own day, and that the day was selected by them.

Will they come? Will Madame Fromont Jeune insult Madame Risler Aine by
absenting herself on her first Friday? The thought makes her almost
feverish with anxiety.

"For heaven's sake, hurry!" she says again and again. "Good heavens!
how long you are at your, breakfast!"

It is a fact that it is one of honest Risler's ways to eat slowly, and to