"I am thinking that no doubt you have a purpose in view," said Margaret, struck by the unlovely shrewdness of the lady's speech.
Madame Hesslein waved her dainty hands in graceful protest.
"Quite wrong, Miss Walsingham," she cried. "I have no purpose as yet, save the pleasant one of studying a nature which I cannot imitate. I have been celebrated in my day, but not as you; women are your worshippers; women cry, 'Noble, generous creature!' Women only envied me, and presumed to criticise; 'twas men who gave me homage."
"Don't jest, madame, upon my history; it may yet end in a tragedy!" said Margaret.
"Ah, ah!" breathed madame, warningly, "you are one of those great hearted, soft souled women who suffer affairs of the heart to trouble them. Don't suffer affairs of the heart to trouble you. Griselda the patient. When one hope dies, pursue another, and have a new one every day. Ha! ha! Joliffe (my husband) used to say, 'Honoria sees no trouble, for her heart is never at home to grant an interview.'"
"Your husband is dead?" asked Margaret, coldly.
"Yes, and no. Dead to me these five years, though. Fact is, Miss Walsingham—don't feel horror-stricken—that Joliffe was intolerably prosy; we had a quarrel, and I ran off. Why not? Since then we have got comfortably divorced, and I can marry as soon as I like again. Joliffe was so jealous. I must not drive to the general's, I must not walk with a senator, I must eschew the military, and the best wits of the day are military men. Horrors! I must devote myself to Joliffe, and he only on the embassy at Washington."
Madame appealed impressively to the icy Margaret.
"General Legrange here declares that you are the widow of a Plenipotentiary of the French Court!" she said.
"Does he indeed?" cried madame, with the gusto of habitual vanity. "Then I sha'n't contradict him—don't you, Miss Walsingham. They must always talk about me wherever I go. I am accustomed to it; I let them say what they choose. I please myself, and the world gives me my way, I've been North and South, East and West, and although I have seen trouble, I have ever trodden over it; no woman has ever got into the wrong box so often and come out of it to a higher grade; no woman has ever borne so much scandal, and been popular in spite of it. I survive it all; I eat, drink, make merry—am feasted, courted, and adored, and all because I don't let affairs of the heart vex me. I don't mope, and muse, and turn melancholy as you (a good creature, too), are doing."