“I can wait on myself.”
She did not think it right that she should oblige a servant to wait up for her pleasure. She preferred to arrange her beautiful hair for the night herself.
* * *
I had noticed the time she spent each day in going over her accounts. It seemed that she always had too much money at her disposal. I was not accustomed to such saving. I attributed to a narrow education that admirable sense of economy which is one of the superiorities of the French woman, expert in thrift and housekeeping, knowing how to be unostentatiously charitable as well, notwithstanding the cosmopolitan crowd encamped among us with its dissipations and luxuries.
“Leave that,” I assured her, “you do not know how to spend money.”
“I need nothing now.”
“But that is the point, you should want all sorts of things.”
“Why should I?”
“Why not, since we can afford them.”
She made me share her charities with her, which were numerous, but she resisted all entreaties to personal luxuries, with a gentleness and disinterestedness which offended me. I unceasingly suggested changes of toilette, and was irritated by the resistance which I encountered, unexpected in any woman, much less in the wife of the millionaire Cernay.