Page:Tales of Three Cities (Boston, James R. Osgood & Co., 1884).djvu/284

mind when, on emerging from the little vestibule, she gave the direction to Beatrice about the position of the door-mat,—in which the young woman, so carefully selected, as a Protestant, from the British Provinces, had never yet taken the interest that her mistress expected from such antecedents. It was Florimond also that she had thought of in putting before her parlor-maid the question of donning a badge of servitude in the shape of a neat little muslin coif, adorned with pink ribbon and stitched together by Mrs. Daintry's own beneficent fingers. Naturally there was no obvious connection between the parlor-maid's coiffure and the length of Florimond's stay; that detail was to be only a part of the general effect of American life. It was still Florimond that was uppermost as his mother, on her way up the hill, turned over in her mind that question of the ceremony of the front-door. He had been living in a country in which servants observed more forms, and he would doubtless be shocked at Beatrice's want of patience. An accumulation of such anomalies would at last undermine his loyalty. He would not care for them for himself, of course, but he would care about them for her; coming from France, where, as she knew by his letters, and indeed by her own reading,—for she made a remarkably free use of the Athenæum,—that the position of a mother was one of the most exalted, he could not fail to be froissé at any want of consideration for his surviving parent. As an artist, he could not make up his mind to live in