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Rh departed husband, you might be going with me instead of that woman."

"The prefix is dearly bought sometimes," replied Hatty, with a smile. "Husbands don't always depart readily when they don't suit."

Elizabeth said nothing. How dearly had she been very near paying for that prefix! It was doubly provoking, now that Madame Martineau had not invited the Barings instead of the two foreign men. How it would have simplified matters! for Hatty and she could have gone together with the brother's escort, which they could not with Narishkine and Doucet. The evening—still early in the autumn—was warm, so they walked to the theatre; Madame de Belcour and the Russian in front, Elizabeth and the poet behind. Doucet was a perpetual diversion to her; she could not take him seriously. His affectations seemed to the healthy-minded girl peculiarities to be treated indulgently, and swept away with not too heavy a hand. One could not break this butterfly on the wheel of grave reprehension. His crude theories, his denunciations of all law, his revolt against every received canon, whether of morals, or literature, or art, his enigmatical ravings, thinly bespattered with cleverness, made Elizabeth smile. It was to his credit, however, that he had never indulged at table in the sort of jokes which the elder men had vied with each other at first in making. But for this she would not have been so lenient to his absurdities. He was young, and he was French, and he had worshipped strange gods; not the fine old classic gods whom she had been taught to revere—Corneille and Racine, Montaigne and the rest—but men whose very