Page:French life in town and country (1917).djvu/308

 not which is the more astounding: her inflexible insistence on the honesty of her bonne, or the flexibility of her conscience when she comes in contact with alien claims upon her own honesty.

Her favourite boarder is the young American or English art student. Young women she naturally prefers, because it is easier to fleece them, and they are shyer of monetary disputes than men or experienced women. She will not scruple to demand for the poorest table imaginable and the perfunctory service of a single maid-of-all-work, the terms of a first-rate pension or a comfortable hotel, where there are servants in plenty and the table is varied and excellent. Her excuse is that, not being a boarding-house keeper or a hotel keeper ("Would that she were either!" dejectedly moan her victims), she is entitled to relatively higher prices for the privilege of a seat at a private table. In the region of bills she is altogether her own mistress, for she has no commercial reputation at stake to balance her notions on the subject of profits, which are colossal, and so she enters every extra she can think of with gaiety of heart, and a smiling conviction that all is fair that puts cash into the big pocket of the rapacious little bourgeoise. Not that she will risk frightening off a possible boarder by a revelation of this view beforehand, and no mention of those formidable