Page:In a winter city, by Ouida.djvu/71

64 had bored him at three audiences about heaven knows what.—'I never knew the use of sentinels before; let that man be shot if he ask audience again!' We cannot shoot him; let us go to supper. Duc, you will follow us, with M. des Gommeux?—and you, too, Della Rocca? There is that odious Canadian woman going; let us make haste; I should like to see that blondine cloak close; I shall know whether it looks like Worth or Pingât."

She passed out on the Duc's arm, and the Lady Hilda accepted Della Rocca's, while the well-trained Maurice, who knew his duties, rushed to find the footmen in the vestibule, and to arrest another gilded youth and kindred spirit, a M. des Poisseux, whom Madame Mila had espied in the crowd, and charged him to bring with him to supper. Madame Mila preferred, to all the world, the young men of her world of five and twenty or less; they had no mind whatever, they had not character enough to be jealous, and they were as full of the last new scandals as any dowager of sixty.

"They talk of the progress of this age: