“I’ve nothing half so pretty as this,” Margery said, despondingly, as she touched the scarlet cloak. “My best coat is plaid, and I only wear it on Sundays.”
“Oh my!” Reinette replied, with a great air of self-importance, “I have three more. One is velvet, lined with rose color, which I wear to church, and when I drive with papa in the Bois. Do you ever go there, or on the Champs d’Elysees?”
“I walk there sometimes on Sundays with mother, but I was never in a real carriage in my life,” was Margery’s reply, and Reinette rejoined:
“Then you shall be. I’ll make Celine—that’s my maid—take us this very afternoon. There’ll be a crowd, and it will be such fun! But why do you wear that big apron and cap?—they disfigure you so.”
Margery blushed and explained that she wore them to keep her clothes clean; then, divesting herself of the obnoxious garments, she shook down her rippling hair, and stood before Reinette, who exclaimed:
“How sweet you are, with that bright sunny hair and those lovely blue eyes! I wish mine were blue. I hate ’em—the nasty old things, so black and so vixenish, Celine says, when I am mad, as I am more than half the time. But tell me, do you really live here all alone with the cat?”
“Oh no.” And in a few words Margery explained her mode of life, which to the pampered child of luxury seemed desolate in the extreme.
“Oh, that’s dreadful!” she said; “and I am so sorry for you! You ought to see our apartments at the Hotel Meurice. They are just lovely! and Chateau des Fleurs our country home, is prettier than the Tuilleries—the grounds are, I mean—and most as pretty as Versailles.”
Margery listened with rapt attention to Reinette’s description of her beautiful home, and then, as she said her father was an American, she suddenly interrupted her with:
“Can you speak English?”