The countess herself in nowise contradicted this conclusion. She was seated on a very low chair, exposing a slippered foot to the flame of a wood fire. She held a magazine in her hand, and yawned as she turned its pages. She was not so stout in person as her loose and somewhat highly colored cheeks would imply. Her eyes were dull and sleepy. The woman was an incarnate yawn.
She looked up, turning lazily in her chair, to note the darkening of the air without the double windows.
“Ah!” she said aloud to herself in French, “when will it be tea-time?”
As she spoke the words, the bells of a sleigh suddenly stopped with a rattle beneath the window.
Immediately the countess rose and went to the mirror over the mantel-piece. She arranged without enthusiasm her straggling hair, and put straight a lace cap which was chronically crooked. She looked at her reflection pessimistically, as well she might. It was the puffy red face of a middle-aged woman given to petty self-indulgence.
“While she was engaged in this discouraging pastime the door was opened, and a maid came in with the air of one who has gained a trifling advantage by the simple method of peeping.
“It is M. Steinmetz, Mme. la Comtesse.”
“Ah! Do I look horrible, Cilestine? I have been asleep.”
Cilestine was French, and laughed with all the charm of that tactful nation.
“How can Mme. la Comtesse ask such a thing? Madame might be thirty-five!”