"Eh bien!" said his wife. "We'll have him to breakfast on Sunday, and try him on a dog! If he's presentable and amusing, I shall make him my exclusive property. If he's dull, I shall tell him Madame Palffy is a woman he should cultivate assiduously. I send her all the people who don't pass muster at my dinners. She has them next day, like warmed-over vol-au-vents. My funeral baked meats do coldly furnish forth her breakfast-table."
"When you wish to appear most unmerciful, my dear," said Jeremy, "you always pick out Madame Palffy; and whenever you do, I spoil the effect of what you say by thinking of—"
"Margery?" put in Mrs. Carnby. "Yes, of course, that's my soft spot, Jeremy. There's only one thing which Margery Palffy ought to be that she isn't, and that's—ahem!—an orphan."
CHAPTER II.
NEW FRIENDS AND OLD.
In ordinary, Mrs. Carnby was one of the rare mortals who succeed in disposing as well as in proposing, but there were times when there was not even a family resemblance between her plans and her performances. She had fully intended that young Vane should be the only guest at her Sunday breakfast, but as she came out of church that morning into the brilliant sunlight of the Avenue de l'Alma, she found herself face to face with the Ratchetts, newly returned from Monte Carlo, and promptly bundled the pair of them into her victoria. Furthermore, as the carriage swung round the Arc, and into the Avenue du Bois, she suddenly espied Mr. Thomas Radwalader, lounging, with an air of infinite boredom, down the plage.
"There's that Radwalader, thinking about himself again!" she exclaimed, digging her coachman in the small of his ample back with the point of her tulle parasol. "Positively, it would be cruelty to animals not to rescue him. Arretez, Benoit!"
Radwalader came up languidly as the carriage stopped.