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Rh ordered an extra plat doux for dinner. Before that meal, the intelligence had penetrated every room in the house, and had aroused curiosity to know what the new inmate was like. The men were disappointed, first, that it was not a woman, in that over-manned establishment; secondly, that it was another Englishman, in which patriotic sentiment Madame de Belcour joined, with affected enthusiasm. In reality, she cared not from what seas were the fish that came to her net. She had not captured either of the two English-speaking men who were boarders at Madame Martineau's, one of whom conspicuously avoided her; the other, while generally polite and agreeable, did not offer up to her the exact sort of incense her vanity and her passions craved. The inhabitants of perfide Albion were all alike cold-blooded, she affirmed, while nourishing a secret hope that the new-comer might prove an exception to the rule. She put on her pale blue dress, trimmed with chiffon, which both Morin and Anatole Doncet had affirmed to be the most becoming of her many costumes. With the faintest touch of rouge (she was too clever to rouge persistently), and her keepsake air, she felt herself to be irresistible. But when Elton entered—mon Dieu! what a blow! She liked height and strength in a man. What pleasure could there be in enslaving a creature like this, with narrow shoulders and undecided legs, surmounted by a keen, ugly face, glazed in with a pince-nez? Not thus had she pictured the physical man of this son of Albion. Mr. George was a far more desirable possession; and as to America's red-bearded representative, he had every personal requisite for a hero, in the lady's eyes. But this Mr. Elton!