"After all, he sent her: he has not quite forgotten me."
CHAPTER XXI.
[AN AUSTRIAN HOST.]
"Hm! indeed! Now I can no longer be shabby at my ease." These were the words with which the Baroness on her return home greeted Stella's joyous announcement of Madame de Rohritz's visit. "I took such pleasure in living in a place where nobody knew me."
However problematical in some respects the creative power of the Baroness may be, she is certainly thoroughly saturated with what the English call 'the sublime egotism of genius.'
When on the morning after her visit a note redolent of violets arrives from Madame de Rohritz, inviting in the kindest manner the two ladies to dinner at half-past seven the next evening but one, the Baroness makes a wry face, and remarks that really Madame de Rohritz might have waited until her call had been returned,--that such a degree of eagerness on the part of a woman of the world betokens a degree of exaggeration,--but, despite her grumbling, permits herself to accede to the entreaty in her daughter's eyes, and to accept the invitation.
"Upon condition that you attend to my dress," she says; to which Stella of course makes no objection.
The evening wardrobe of the Baroness consists of a black velvet gown which is now precisely seventeen years old, and which underwent renovation at the time of her eldest daughter's marriage. The number of Stella's evening dresses is limited to two very charming gowns which the colonel had made for her in Venice, regardless of expense, by the best dress-maker there, but which are at present slightly old-fashioned.
But, neglectful as the Baroness is about her personal appearance, she has an air of great distinction when she makes up her mind to be presentable, and covers her short gray hair, usually flying loose about her ears, with a black lace cap; while Stella is always charming. She would be lovely in the brown robe of a monk; in her pale-blue cachemire, with a bunch of yellow roses on her left shoulder, directly below her ear, she is bewitching. Her heart throbs not a little as she drives with her mother in a draughty, rattling fiacre across Paris to the Avenue Villiers.
She is not at all tired of life to-day, but, entirely forgetting how quickly her air-built castles fall to ruin, she is eagerly engaged again in similar architecture.