Page:In a winter city, by Ouida.djvu/218

Rh then one couldn't live on pictures, marbles, and recollections, and one got so sick of seeing the same people morning, noon, and night. The fogs were very bad. The drainage was dreadful. The thermometer was very nearly what it was in Normandy or Northamptonshire for what she could see. If one did take the trouble to go into society, one might as well do it all for a big world and not a little one. It was utter nonsense about her lungs in Paris. She would go back. She would telegraph her return to Hubert.

Hubert was her maître d'hôtel.

She did telegraph, and told herself that she would find immense interest in the fresco paintings which were being executed in the ball-room of that very exquisite hôtel "entre cour et jardin," which she had deserted in Paris, and in making nooks and corners in her already over-filled tables and cabinets for the tazze and bacini and ivories and goldsmith's work she had collected in the last two months; and decided that the wall decorations of the drawing-rooms, which were of rose satin, with Louis Quinze panelling, P 2