“Look here, little one!” said to him just such another “little one” at a breakfast party—where champagne was made to represent the tone of good society that the greater part of the guests lacked—“what has become of La Lucia?”
“She was not very well, and I left her in Sevilla,” responded the hero.
“Doesn’t it strike you that she is losing her varnish?”
“At twenty-one, man?”
“It is not singular,” remarked the elegant son of a capitalist (the youth had been educated in France). “At that age, one who lives fast is sur le retour.”[57]
“The existence of camellias is like that of roses,” quickly added another, whose Christian name of Bonifacio they were in the habit of contracting into Boni.
Having constituted himself an inseparable copy of the engrafted Parisian, and not wishing to fall behind his model in anything, Boni never allowed the capitalist to express an idea without instantly reproducing it in different words, always endeavoring to surpass the original in elegant Gallicisms; in scepticism of the most material, and cynicism of the most approved kind, and in extreme affectation of the fashionable foreign mannerism.
“You ought to place this Lucia dis-lucent among the number of the thousand-and-one Didos,” said the would-be Gaul.
“Lay her aside with last year’s modes fanées,”[58] the copy hastened to add.