CHAPTER XXI
HOW A TRIP TO A WATERING-PLACE SAILS THROUGH A CALCULATION
[Elsie and her mother go to spend a week at the Gurnigel, a fashionable resort, leaving a heavenly peace behind them. Elsie attracts extraordinary attention with her clothes, and is too stupid to understand that she is being ridiculed to her face. At the same time her hundred thousand francs dowry are not to be sneezed at, and these lure a bird of prey in the shape of a cotton-dealer, who takes mother and daughter off for a drive, and, making good use of his opportunity, carries his point by storm. Elsie is in the seventh heaven, her mother not quite so overjoyed.]