Page:In a winter city, by Ouida.djvu/72

 M. de St. Louis with M. des Gommeux and M. des Poisseux!" said the Lady Hilda, with her little contemptuous smile.

Della Rocca laughed.

"You make me for the first time, Madame, well content to belong to what the Gommeux and the Poisseux would call a past generation. But there are not many like our friend the Duc; he has stepped down to us from the terraces of Marly; I am certain he went to sleep one night after a gavotte with Montespan, and has only just awakened."

The supper was gay and bright; Lady Hilda, rejecting chicken and champagne, and accepting only ice-water and cigarettes, deigned to be amusing, though sarcastic, and Madame Mila was always in one of the two extremes—either syncope, sal volatile, and hysterics, or laughter, frolic, smoke and risqué stories.

She and her sisterhood spend their lives in this see-saw; the first state is for the mornings, when they remember their losses at play, their lovers' looks at other women, the compromising notes they have written, and how much—too much to be