"Misericordia! What a temper! Well, you can follow up the deduction for yourself; you were always the stronger of us two in logic. You know how hard I tried for the prix de logique which you carried off so swimmingly."
"Why will you keep harping upon that old story?" was the impatient retort.
Somehow the memory of that triumph was not a congenial thought to-day; and, with a start, Gretchen checked herself on the verge of the heretical reflection that the reputation of having gained a prix de logique is not the easiest thing in the world to live up to.
"And now," said Belita, carefully scrutinising her friend's face, "be so kind as to tell me what other possible answer you could have expected to your most incomprehensible question?"
"I thought there might be another sort of happiness, that is all." She was speaking more to herself than to Belita.
"Misericordia!" murmured the Contessa, wringing her hands, "she has been reading books; she has got a poetical fit upon her. I wonder how these cases should be treated"?
"What other sort could possibly exist?" she continued, after a disconcerted pause. "People make such a fuss about missing their happiness, and so on; but you and I, Margherita, are wiser: we know that the way is simple. You have only got to marry a rich man, who is good-natured, and who, if possible, matches you in height, – whom you don't mind seeing every day, but whom you will not miss when he is away, and who can make himself useful —"
"For looping up tunics on, for instance?" suggested Gretchen.
"For looping up tunics on, exactly," said the Contessa, unperturbed.
"But are you and I wiser, Belita? That is what I want to know. We are either much wiser or much more foolish than the rest of the world."
Perhaps the growing consternation of Belita's face alarmed Gretchen as to what she had said. Without waiting for an answer, she snatched up the fashion-paper beside her.
"Why do you keep nothing but these ridiculous papers? Novels are much more interesting."
"Novels! just as I feared," sighed Belita to herself. Her worst apprehensions were justified.
"Did you read that novel I sent you, Belita?"
"I glanced at it, my dear; but I do not think it was worth finishing. The idea of making the heroine wear a chignon, when every educated person knows that chignons were quite out of fashion in 1870. I read as far as the chignon, but I could not get over that."
"Then you do not know the end? I sat up all night reading it."
"A very foolish thing for you to do."
"I could not get to sleep without knowing whether the heroine would give up the hero or not, after he had lost his fortune."
"And she did not?"
"No; she did not."
"More fool she. But he got back his fortune, of course? They always do at the end of the third volume."
"He did get back his fortune," Gretchen reluctantly admitted.
Belita shook her head.
"I do not understand you, Margherita."
"Really? How strange!"
What would not Gretchen have given to any one at that moment
