“Madame Villefort’s? No, not yet. It was Trent—Mademoiselle Bertha Trent.”
“She is not twenty yet,” said Madame, in a queer, grumbling tone. “What did she marry that man for?”
“God knows,” replied M. Renard, not too devoutly, “Paris does not.”
For some reason best known to herself, Madame de Castro looked angry. She was a shrewd old person, with strong whims of her own, even at seventy. She quite glared at the pretty American from under her bushy eyebrows.
“Le Monsieur de la petite Dame!” she fumed. “I tell you it is low—low to give a man such names.”
“Oh!” returned Renard, shrugging his shoulders, “we did not give it to him. It was an awkward servant who dubbed him so at first. She was new to her position, and forgot his name, and being asked who had arrived, stumbled upon this bon mot: ‘Un monsieur, Madame—le monsieur de la petite dame,’’—and, being repeated and tossed lightly from hand to hand, it has become at last an established witticism, albeit bandied under breath.”
It was characteristic of the august De Castro that during the remainder of the evening’s entertainment she should occupy herself more with her neighbors than with the opera. She aroused M. Renard to a secret ecstasy of mirth by the sharp steadiness of her observation of the inmates of the box opposite to them. She talked about them, too, in a tone not too well modulated, criticising the beautifully dressed little woman, her hair, her eyes, her Greek nose and mouth, and, more than all, her indifferent expression and her manner of leaning upon the edge of her box and staring at the stage as if she did not care for, and indeed scarcely saw, what was going on upon it.
“That is the way with your American beauties,” she said. “They have no respect for things. Their people spoil them—their men especially. They consider themselves privileged to act as their whims direct. They have not the gentle timidity of Frenchwomen. What French girl would have the sang froid to sit in one of the best boxes of the Nouvelle Opéra and regard, with an actual air of ennui, such a performance as this? She does not hear a word that is sung.”
“And we—do we hear?” bantered M. Renard.
“Pouf!” cried Madame. “We! We are world-dried and weather-beaten. We have not a worm-eaten emotion between us. I am seventy, and you, who are thirty-five, are the elder of the two. Bah! At that girl’s age I had the heart of a dove.”