who treated herself to handsome chauffeurs. Having prepared himself to come into the presence of a rather determined sort of siren, Grover was disconcerted to find a peaceful, stout, tidy, middle-aged, practical woman in a plain calico house dress, her feet shod with felt slippers, her lap heaped with wool from which she was knitting socks for, Grover hoped, her genius of a husband.
"Bonjour, mon Léon," she called out as they entered. "Come and kiss me. It's months since you've been near us. Casimir is quite vexed with you. Give an account of yourself!"
The glitter which Grover noticed in her small black eyes while exchanging polite introductory remarks with her furnished the confirmation of Léon's allusion to her rapacity. Her cordiality, he reflected, is due, first to the fact that I'm brought by Vaudreuil; second to the fact that, being an American, I may have a million dollars in my waistcoat pocket which I'm dying to exchange for the portrait of a calla lily.
"What, all that distance!" she was exclaiming, referring to their walk from the Parc Monceau. "You must be dead. Rosalie!" she called to an invisible but audible maid. "Some wine for these gentlemen!"
Mme. Casimir, Grover reflected, is impressed by the elegance of Vaudreuil's address. It's nothing in her life that a lady keeps him there; she and Noémi, she feels, c'est quasiment, and if a national institution like Noémi, who has the Légion d'Honneur and sings the
