‘What was petit papa saying to you?’ cried the little sisters in a breath.
They were pretty children, with clouds of hair and saucy peevish little faces. They wore sailor dresses, made very short at the knee and showing legs very shapely though too thin. Blanchette was blonde; Toinon was a little darker and rosier. Blanchette was the more elegant and the more witty by far; Toinon was the sturdier and the naughtier. But Toinon had still something of childhood left in her; Blanchette had lost every atom of hers years before, though she was only ten years old now. Toinon loved horses, dogs, boats, and le sport generally; Blanchette only cared for smart frocks, things which cost a great deal of money, scandal which she overheard, and which fascinated her in proportion as it was unintelligible to her, and the sense that she was looked at admiringly as she drove behind the ponies in the Bois or walked, with a court of small boys behind her, down the planks at Trouville.
Between her two cousins and Yseulte de Valogne there was a great gulf fixed, that gulf into which there has fallen so much of the innocence of youth, of the grace of good manners, of the charm of girlhood, and of the obligation of nobility; that gulf over which modern society dances so lightly, blind and indifferent to all it has lost.
‘What was petit papa saying?’ cried Blanchette and Toinon in one breath, their eyes wide open with curiosity and sparkling with suspicion.
Yseulte hesitated; she scarcely knew what to say, and a kind of oppression came upon her with the sense of the gift and the secret which she had to keep and conceal.
‘He was telling me that I was invited—there—last night,’ she said, as she looked across at the trees of S. Pharamond; ‘but they thought me not old enough,’ she added, with an unconscious sigh.
Blanchette turned up her little delicate nose in the air.
‘Grande nigaude, va!’ she said contemptuously. ‘You will never be anything but a big baby, you! When I am as old as you, I shall have been married a whole year to a crown prince, and have gone to all the theatres, and read all the newspapers—every one!’
‘But she will never see a newspaper, and never go to a theatre; never, never, never,—a big never!’ cried Toinon, who was two years younger than Blanchette, as she clapped her hands and capered.