The wanderers signed for the apartment, however, and moved in at once. It was on the Rue de Rivoli, among more modern apartment houses and mansions; but it was set back from the street, with a high iron fence and a very ornate gateway and grill in front of it. The courtyard was flagged, with a dry fountain on either hand as one walked to the house. A handful of dry stalks in the narrow strips of baked earth that had been garden-beds told of the summer's drought. The flowers were no more.
Dust rose from the rugs as they walked through the rooms, and Aunt Roberta sneezed.
"Gesundheit!" her niece wished absently.
"Don't! Don't dare speak that heathen tongue here!" cried Aunt Roberta in horror. "Do you wish us both to be arrested as spies?"
Then she opened her trunk, found one of her starchy print dresses, put it on, and commenced to clean. Although dinner was brought in from a restaurant, Aunt Roberta had not finished cleaning by bedtime.
"And those beds! Have they never heard of iron beds, and proper springs, and a sanitary mattress?" burst forth the good woman at last. "Ah! those canopies—reeking of the First Empire, I am con-fi-dent! The heaps of dust and debris in the closets! The pots and pans, smoky and greasy on the outside, and burned within! That concierge—le sale cultivateur!—no more fit for his tasks than one of the pigs he was wont to drive before he migrated to Paris!"
"But this is Paris," Belinda ventured to remind her.
"Not the Paris of my memory," Aunt Roberta grumbled. She was beginning to realize the change.
That was a memorable night for both.
"This is truly 'embattled France,'" cried Belinda, finally driven from between the sheets of her bed by the enemy horde; and she spent the remainder of the night lying in her robe on top of the bedclothes, which she first carefully tucked in all around so as to confine the warring insects to their trenches.