She Wore A Black Bombazine Gown, And List Slippers.

When in the garden, where she was always busy in the summer-time, she put on wooden sabots over her slippers.

Despite this homely exterior, she herself was a 'lady' in every sense of the word. Her manner was dignified and courteous to everyone. To her daughters and to myself she was gentle and affectionate. Her voice was sympathetic, almost musical. I never saw her temper ruffled. I never heard her allude to her antecedents.

The daughters were as unlike their mother as they were to one another. Adele, the eldest, was very stout, with a profusion of grey ringlets. She spoke English fluently. I gathered, from her mysterious nods and tosses of the head, (to be sure, her head wagged a little of its own accord, the ringlets too, like lambs' tails,) that she had had an AFFAIRE DE COEUR with an Englishman, and that the perfidious islander had removed from the Continent with her misplaced affections. She was a trifle bitter, I thought - for I applied her insinuations to myself - against Englishmen generally. But, though cynical in theory, she was perfectly amiable in practice. She superintended the menage and spent the rest of her life in making paper flowers. I should hardly have known they were flowers, never having seen their prototypes in nature. She assured me, however, that they were beautiful copies - undoubtedly she believed them to be so.

Henriette, the youngest, had been the beauty of the family. This I had to take her own word for, since here again there was much room for imagination and faith. She was a confirmed invalid, and, poor thing! showed every symptom of it. She rarely left her room except for meals; and although it was summer when I was there, she never moved without her chauffrette. She seemed to live for the sake of patent medicines and her chauffrette; she was always swallowing the one, and feeding the other.

The middle daughter was Aglae. Mademoiselle Aglae took charge - I may say, possession - of me. She was tall, gaunt, and bony, with a sharp aquiline nose, pomegranate cheek- bones, and large saffron teeth ever much in evidence. Her speciality, as I soon discovered, was sentiment. Like her sisters, she had had her 'affaires' in the plural. A Greek prince, so far as I could make out, was the last of her adorers. But I sometimes got into scrapes by mixing up the Greek prince with a Polish count, and then confounding either one or both with a Hungarian pianoforte player.

Without formulating my deductions, I came instinctively to the conclusion that 'En fait d'amour,' as Figaro puts it, 'trop n'est pas meme assez.' From Miss Aglae's point of view a lover was a lover. As to the superiority of one over another, this was - nay, is - purely subjective. 'We receive but what we give.' And, from what Mademoiselle then told me, I cannot but infer that she had given without stint.

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