Atherton with Sibyl Sanderson during the Paris Exposition of 1889. She remembered the woman well, her plaits of straw-coloured hair bound round her head like a coronet, her fresh, startling beauty, her wit, her superabundant vitality. It had been some time since she had read a novel of hers; perhaps A Whirl Asunder had been the last. She determined to read Patience Sparhawk. Flipping the leaves of the current Harper's she discovered that a new serial by the author of Trilby was running in it. It seemed pleasant to meet so many French words and phrases in an American magazine.
At supper, a little later, she and Lou sat at a table long enough for twelve in the great dining-room with its high ceiling. The Countess was appalled when it came to her how many times Lou must have sat at this table in this forbidding room entirely alone. A sciapodous Bohemian girl, in a shirt-waist and skirt—servants in Maple Valley did not don cap and apron; it was not considered democratic—and great bulging boots, waited on them. Most of the servants in the town, Ella soon discovered, were Bohemians. The supper was a good, home-cooked meal of a kind which had become strange to the Countess, but which, nevertheless, she enjoyed. It seemed a sacrilege to cut asparagus into small sections and boil it in cream, but she found that it tasted good, eaten from a sidedish with a spoon. Nor did she balk at the lettuce
