"Bored! Dieu, que non!" The black little beauty threw back her throat, laughing, as she rolled her great eyes. "Bored—with all the tricks I was playing? Fernande! pity me, there was such a little time, and so much to do!"
"So little time—only fourteen kilos!" The countess compressed her lips; they were smiling no longer.
"Ah, but you see, I had so much to combat. You had a whole season, last summer, in which to play your game, your solemn game." Here the gay young widow rippled forth a pearly scale of treble laughter. "And I have had only a week, thus far!"
"Yes, but what time you make!"
And this time both ladies laughed, although, still, only one laughed well.
"Ah! those women—how they love each other," commented Renard, as he sat on the bench, swinging his legs, with his eyes following the two vanishing figures. "Only women who are intimate—Parisian intimates—can cut to the bone like that, with a surgeon's dexterity."
He explained then that the handsome brunette was a widow, a certain Baronne d'Autun, noted for her hunting and her conquests; the last on the latter list was Monsieur d'Agreste, a former admirer of the countess; he was somewhat famous as a scientist and socialist, so good a socialist as to refuse to wear his title of duke. The other two gentlemen of the party, who had joined them now, the two horsemen, were the Comtes de Mirant and de Fonbriant. These latter were two typical young swells of the Jockey Club model; their vacant, well-bred faces wore the correct degree of fashionable pallor, and their manners appeared to be also as perfect as their glances were insolent.
Into these vacant faces the languid countess was breathing the inspiration of her smile. Enigmatic as was the latter, it was as simple as an infant's compared to the occult character of her glance. A wealth of complexities lay enfolded in the deep eyes, rimmed with their mystic darkened circlet—that circle in which the Parisienne frames her experience, and through which she pleads to have it enlarged!
A Frenchwoman and cosmetics! Is there any other combination on this round earth more suggestive of the comedy of high life, of its elegance and of its perfidy, of its finish and of its emptiness?
The men of the party wore costumes perilously suggestive of Opera Bouffe models. Their fingers were richly begemmed; their watch-chains were laden with seals and charms. Any one of the costumes was such as might have been chosen by a tenor in which to warble effectively to a soubrette on the boards of a provincial theatre; and it was worn by these fops of the Jockey Club with the air of its being the last word in nautical fashions. Better than their costumes were their voices; for what speech from human lips pearls itself off with such crispness and finish as the delicate French idiom from a Parisian tongue?