“Ah! my dear, you are much nicer here on your own ground than at the theatre,” Heloise remarked. “I advise you to keep to your employment.”
Heloise was splendidly dressed. Bixiou, her lover, had brought her in his carriage on the way to an evening party at Mariette’s. It so fell out that the first-floor lodger, M. Chapoulot, a retired braid manufacturer from the Rue Saint-Denis, returning from the Ambigu-Comique with his wife and daughter, was dazzled by a vision of such a costume and such a charming woman upon their staircase.
“Who is that, Mme. Cibot?” asked Mme. Chapoulot.
“A no-better-than-she-should-be, a light-skirts that you may see half-naked any evening for a couple of francs,” La Cibot answered in an undertone for Mme. Chapoulot’s ear.
“Victorine!” called the braid manufacturer’s wife, “let the lady pass, child.”
The matron’s alarm signal was not lost upon Heloise.
“Your daughter must be more inflammable than tinder, madame, if you are afraid that she will catch fire by touching me,” she said.
M. Chapoulot waited on the landing. “She is uncommonly handsome off the stage,” he remarked. Whereupon Mme. Chapoulot pinched him sharply and drove him indoors.
“Here is a second-floor lodger that has a mind to set up for being on the fourth floor,” said Heloise as she continued to climb.
“But mademoiselle is accustomed to going higher and higher.”