"Eh, ma cousine, if you could see yourself!" she cried.
"It is true," said Rosalie, with composure, "I grow stouter; but at your age, Thérèse, I was slighter than you. It is the same with us all—at twenty we are thin, at thirty we are plump, and at forty—" She waved a fat hand over her expansive form and shrugged an explanatory shoulder, whilst her small eyes dwelt with a malicious expression on Thérèse's frowning face.
The girl lifted the handsomest shoulders in Paris. "I am not a stick," she observed, with that ready flush of hers; "it is these thin girls, whom one cannot see if one looks at them sideways, who grow so stout later on. I shall stay as I am, or maybe get scraggy—quel horreur!"—and she shuddered a little—"but it will not be yet awhile."
Rosalie nodded.
"You are not thirty yet," she said comfortably, "and you are a fine figure of a woman. 'T is a pity Citizen Dangeau cannot be made to see it!"
Up went Thérèse's head in a trice, and her bold colour mounted.
"Hé!"—she snorted contemptuously—"is he the world? Others are not so blind."
There was a pause. Rosalie knitted, smiling broadly, whilst Thérèse caught a second apple from a piled basket, and began to play with it.
"He is going away," said Rosalie abruptly, and Thérèse dropped the apple, which rolled away into a corner.
"Tctt, tctt," clicked Rosalie, "you have an open hand with other folk's goods, my girl! Yes, certainly Citizen Dangeau is going away, and why not? There is nothing to keep him here that I know of."