"Adhesive as burs," Sylvia thought.
"But really the best story of all," Madame Corvelis went on, "is to find myself here in this miserable little house. That's a pretty bag you have," she added to Sylvia. "A very pretty bag. Ah, mon Dieu, when I think of the jewelry I've left behind."
At this moment M. Corvelis came in with the cunningly detached expression of a husband who has been hustled out of the room by his wife at the sound of a bell in order to convey an impression, when he has had time to change his clothes, that he habitually dresses en grande tenue. It was thus that Odette described her own preparatory toilet, and she was ravished by M. Corvelis's reciprocity, whispering to Sylvia her sense of the compliment to his humble visitors.
"Homme chic! homme du monde! homme élégant! Mais ça se voit. Dis, t'es contente?"
Sylvia smiled and nodded.
The mold of form who had drawn such an ecstasy of self-congratulatory admiration from Odette treated the two actresses as politely as his wife had done, and asked Sylvia the same questions. When his reduplication of the first catechism was practically complete, Odette gave the signal for departure, and in a cyclone of farewells and compliments they left.
"Elle est vraiment une femme du monde?" Odette demanded.
"De pied en cap," Sylvia replied.
"Ton sac en or lui plaisait beaucoup," said Odette, a little enviously. "Ah, when I think of myself eight years ago," she went on, "it seems incroyable. I should like to invite them both to tea again chez Eliane. If only the other girls were like you! And last time I put too much sugar in her tea! Non, je n'ose pas! One sees the opportunity to raise oneself, but one does not dare grasp it. C'est la vie," she sighed.
Moved by the vision of herself thwarted from advancing any higher, Odette poured out to Sylvia the story of her life—a sad, squalid story, lit up here and there by the flashes of melodramatic events and culminating in the revelation of this paradise that was denied her.