Chapter 7

It may as well be said at once that his prevision was soon made good and
that in the course of a fortnight old Mr. Probert and his daughters
alighted successively at the Hotel de l'Univers et de Cheltenham.
Francie's visit with her intended to Mme. de Brecourt bore exactly the
fruit her admirer had foretold and was followed the very next day by a
call from this lady. She took the girl out with her in her carriage and
kept her the whole afternoon, driving her half over Paris, chattering
with her, kissing her, delighting in her, telling her they were already
sisters, paying her compliments that made Francie envy her art of saying
things as she had never heard things said--for the excellent reason,
among many, that she had never known such things COULD be. After she had
dropped her charge this critic rushed off to her father's, reflecting
with pleasure that at that hour she should probably find her sister
Marguerite there. Mme. de Cliche was with their parent in fact--she had
three days in the week for coming to the Cours la Reine; she sat near
him in the firelight, telling him presumably her troubles, for, Maxime
de Cliche having proved not quite the pearl they had originally
supposed, Mme. de Brecourt knew what Marguerite did whenever she took
that little ottoman and drew it close to the paternal chair: she gave
way to her favourite vice, that of dolefulness, which lengthened her
long face more: it was unbecoming if she only knew it. The family was
intensely united, as we see; but that didn't prevent Mme. de Brecourt's
having a certain sympathy for Maxime: he too was one of themselves, and
she asked herself what SHE would have done had she been a well-
constituted man with a wife whose cheeks were like decks in a high sea.
It was the twilight hour in the winter days, before the lamps, that
especially brought her out; then she began her long stories about her
complicated cares, to which her father listened with angelic patience.
Mme. de Brecourt liked his particular room in the old house in the Cours
la Reine; it reminded her of her mother's life and her young days and
her dead brother and the feelings connected with her first going into
the world. Alphonse and she had had an apartment, by her father's
kindness, under the roof that covered in associations as the door of a
linen-closet preserves herbaceous scents, so that she continued to pop
in and out, full of her fresh impressions of society, just as she had
done when she was a girl. She broke into her sister's confidences now;
she announced her trouvaille and did battle for it bravely.

Five days later--there had been lively work in the meantime; Gaston
turned so pale at moments that she feared it would all result in a
mortal illness for him, and Marguerite