houses between the Avenue Victor Hugo and the Avenue du Bois de Boulogne,
which is more important than ancestors.

It was to this miniature palace that Mademoiselle Brun and Denise were
bidden, to the new function of afternoon tea, the day after the receipt
of the lawyer's letter. Madame de Melide would take no denial.

"I have already heard of Denise's good fortune; and from whom do you
think?" she wrote. "From my dear good cousin, Lory de Vasselot, who is,
if you will believe it, a Corsican neighbour--the Vasselot and Perucca
estates actually adjoin. Both, I need hardly tell you, bristle with
bandits, and are quite impossible. But I have quite decided that Lory
shall marry Denise. Come, therefore, without fail. I need not tell you to
see that Denise looks pretty. The good God has seen to that for you. And
as for Lory, he is an angel. I cannot think why I did not marry him
myself--except that he did not ask me. And then there is my stupid, whom
nobody else would have, and who now sends his dear love to his oldest
friend.--Your devoted JANE."

The Baroness de Melide was called Jeanne, but she had enthusiastically
changed that name for its English version at the period when England was,
as it were, first discovered by social France.

When Mademoiselle Brun and Denise arrived, they found the baroness
beautifully dressed as usual, and very French, for the empress was at
this time the leader of the world's women, as the emperor--that clever
_parvenu_--was undoubtedly the first monarch in Europe. It behoves not a
masculine pen to attempt a description of Madame de Melide's costume,
which, moreover, was of a bygone mode, and nothing is so unsightly in
death as a deceased fashion.