He entered: a small, dark, and square man, in spectacles.
"Mon cousin," began madame, "read that countenance."
The little man fixed on me his spectacles, a gathering of the brows seeming to say that a veil would be no veil to him.
"Do you need her services?" he asked.
"I could do with them," said Madame Beck.
"Engage her." And with a ban soir this sudden arbiter of my destiny vanished.
Madame Beck possessed high administrative powers. She ruled a hundred and twenty pupils, four teachers, eight masters, six servants and three children, and managed the pupils' parents and friends to perfection, without apparent effort. "Surveillance," "espionage"--these were the watchwords of her system. She knew what honesty was, and liked it--when it did not obtrude its clumsy scruples in the way of her will and interest. Wise, firm, faithless, secret, crafty, passionless, watchful and inscrutable--withal perfectly decorous--what more could be desired?
Not a soul in all Madame Beck's house, from the scullion to the directress herself, but was above being ashamed of a lie; they thought nothing of it.
Here Miss Ginevra Fanshawe was a thriving pupil. She had a considerable range of acquaintances outside the school, for Mrs. Cholmondeley, her chaperon, a gay, fashionable lady, took her to evening parties at the houses of her acquaintances. Soon I discovered by hints that ardent admiration, perhaps genuine love, was at the command of this pretty and charming, but by no means refined, girl. She called her suitor "Isidore," and bragged about the vehemence of his attachment. I asked her if she loved him in return.
"He is handsome; he loves me to distraction; and so I am amused," was the reply.