“Oh!” exclaims Risler, unable to find words to reply.

“Oh! yes, of course!  I advise you to admire their child.  She’s always ill.  She cries all night like a little cat.  It keeps me awake.  And afterward, through the day, I have mamma’s piano and her scales—­tra, la la la!  If the music were only worth listening to!”

Risler has taken the wise course.  He does not say a word until he sees that she is beginning to calm down a little, when he completes the soothing process with compliments.

“How pretty we are to-day!  Are we going out soon to make some calls, eh?”

He resorts to this mode of address to avoid the more familiar form, which is so offensive to her.

“No, I am not going to make calls,” Sidonie replies with a certain pride.  “On the contrary, I expect to receive them.  This is my day.”

In response to her husband’s astounded, bewildered expression she continues: 

“Why, yes, this is my day.  Madame Fromont has one; I can have one also, I fancy.”

“Of course, of course,” said honest Risler, looking about with some little uneasiness.  “So that’s why I saw so many flowers everywhere, on the landing and in the drawing-room.”

“Yes, my maid went down to the garden this morning.  Did I do wrong?  Oh! you don’t say so, but I’m sure you think I did wrong.  ‘Dame’!  I thought the flowers in the garden belonged to us as much as to the Fromonts.”

“Certainly they do—­but you—­it would have been better perhaps—­”

“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!”