Madame Sennier spread out her hands, which were encased in thick white kid gloves sewn with black. Her amazingly thin figure, which made ignorant people wonder whether she possessed the physical mechanism declared by anatomists to be necessary to human life, somehow proclaimed a negative.
"My husband opens his door, the window too. Yours keeps his door shut and the blinds over the window. Jacques gives all, like a child. Your husband seems to give sometimes; but he really gives nothing."
"Of course, the English temperament is very different from the French," said Charmian, in a constrained voice.
"Very!" said Mrs. Shiffney.
Was she smiling behind the veil?
"You ought to go to America," said Madame Sennier. "Nobody knows what real life is who has not seen New York in the season. Paris, London, they are sleepy villages in comparison with New York."
"I should like to see it," replied Charmian. "But we have nothing to take us there, no reason to go."
She laughed and added:
"And Claude and I are not millionaires."
Madame Sennier talked for two or three minutes of the great expense of living in a smart New York hotel, and then said: