CHAPTER III

“You will have to go back to the cousins you’ve been living with in Paris,” pronounced Lady Kilmarny.  “You’re much too young and pretty to be anywhere alone.”

“I can’t go on living with them unless I promise to marry Monsieur Charretier,” I explained.  “I’d rather scrub floors than marry Monsieur Charretier.”

“You’d never finish one floor.  The second would finish you.  I thought French girls—­well, then, half French girls—­usually let their people arrange their marriages.”

“Perhaps I’m not usual.  I hope Monsieur Charretier isn’t.”

“Is he such a monster?”

“He is fat, especially in all the places he oughtn’t to be fat.  And old.  But worse than his embonpoint and his nose, he made his money in—­you could never guess.”

“I see by your face, my poor child:  it was Liver Pills.”

“Something far more dreadful.”

“Are there lower depths?”

“There are—­Corn Plasters.”

“Oh, my dear, you are quite right!  You couldn’t marry him.”

“Thank you so much!  Then, I can’t go back to my cousins.  They—­they take Monsieur Charretier seriously.  I think they even take his plasters—­gratuitously.”

“Is he so very rich?”

“But disgustingly rich.  He has an awful, bulbous new chateau in the country, with dozens of incredibly high-powered motor-cars; and in the most expensive part of Paris a huge apartment wriggling from floor to ceiling with Nouveau Art.  The girl who marries him will have to be smeared with diamonds, and know the most appalling people.  In fact, she’ll have to be a kind of walking, pictorial advertisement for the 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