Page:In a winter city, by Ouida.djvu/224

Rh was an American "pick-me-up:"—that was all. Society took them indifferently, one after the other. Of the two, of course it preferred Jenny Léa.

The Lady Hilda in supreme disgust went out in her sables, as Mdlle. Jenny Léa in hers drove from the door.

"What good things sumptuary laws must have been," she thought. "If such creatures had to dress all in yellow now, as I think they had once (or was it Jews?), who would talk of them, who would look at them, who would lose money about them? Not a soul. And to think that there have been eighty thousand people who have bought her book!"

"Has anything offended you, Madame? Who or what is so unhappy?" said the voice of Della Rocca, as she crossed the pavement of the court between the lines of bowing hôtel functionaries, who had bent their spines double in just the same way to Mdlle. Léa three minutes previously.

"Nothing in especial," she answered him, coldly. "Those baccarat people kept me awake half the night; I wish the gendarmes had interfered. What wretched weather it is!"