Page:In a winter city, by Ouida.djvu/316

Rh enabled you to go to balls a fortnight longer: if it was still your husband's carnival, you know, nobody could say anything.

Madame Mila thought you should always do your best to please everybody; but then you should take care that you pleased yourself first most of all. The world was easy enough to live in if you did not worry: there were always unpaid bills to be sure, and they were odious. But then Hilda never had any unpaid bills; so she never could have anything to annoy her.

Apropos of bills, she hoped Della Rocca would not use his influence with her cousin so as to prevent her paying other people's bills. Of course he wouldn't do this just at present; but when men had been lovers a little while, she reflected, they always turned the poetry into prose, and grew very nearly as bad as husbands.

Madame Mila watched them narrowly all through dinner.

"If I thought he'd make her stingy, I'd make her jealous of Giulia Malatesta to-morrow," she thought to herself. Madame Mila on occasion