At breakfast I encountered his ladies—his wife and daughter. They were placed, however, at a distance from me, and it was not until the pensionnaires had dispersed, and some of them, according to custom, had come out into the garden, that he had an opportunity of making me acquainted with them.
“Will you allow me to introduce you to my daughter?” he said, moved apparently by a paternal inclination to provide this young lady with social diversion. She was standing with her mother, in one of the paths, looking about with no great complacency, as I imagined, at the homely characteristics of the place, and old M. Pigeonneau was hovering near, hesitating apparently between the desire to be urbane and the absence of a pretext. “Mrs. Ruck—Miss Sophy Ruck,” said my friend, leading me up.
Mrs. Ruck was a large, plump, light-coloured person, with a smooth fair face, a somnolent eye, and an elaborate coiffure. Miss Sophy was a girl of one-and-twenty, very small and very pretty—what I suppose would have been called a lively brunette. Both of these ladies were attired in black silk dresses, very much trimmed; they had an air of the highest elegance.
“Do you think highly of this pension?” inquired Mrs. Ruck, after a few preliminaries.
“It’s a little rough, but it seems to me comfortable,” I answered.
“Does it take a high rank in Geneva?” Mrs. Ruck pursued.
“I imagine it enjoys a very fair fame,” I said, smiling.
“I should never dream of comparing it to a New York boarding-house,” said Mrs. Ruck.
“It’s quite a different style,” her daughter observed.
Miss Ruck had folded her arms; she was holding her elbows with a pair of white little hands, and she was tapping the ground with a pretty little foot.