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.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 19 of 404
Words from 4717 to 4982
of 106633
