Page:In a winter city, by Ouida.djvu/222

Rh wrapped in her sables, and thought she would go out;—it was just twelve o'clock.

Looking out of the window she saw a lady all sables like herself, going also out of the hôtel to a coupé, the image of her own.

"Who is that?" she asked of her favourite maid.

"That is Mdlle. Léa, Miladi," said the maid. "She came last night. She has the suite above."

"How dare you mention her?" said the Lady Hilda.

The little accident filled up the measure of her disgust. Mdlle. Jenny Léa was a young lady who had seduced the affections of an Emperor, three archdukes, and an untold number of the nobility of all nations; she was utterly uneducated, inconceivably coarse, and had first emerged from a small drinking shop in the dens of Whitechapel; she was the rage of the moment, having got a needy literary hack to write her autobiography, which she published in her own name, as "Aventures d'une Anglaise;" the book had no decency, and as little wit, but it professed to show