Page:In a winter city, by Ouida.djvu/73

 safe—their maids knew of them; the second state is for the evenings, when they have their war-paint on, have taken a little nip of some stimulant at afternoon tea, are going to half-a-dozen houses between midnight and dawn, and are quite sure their lovers never even see that any other women exist.

"He could not have a better illustration of the difference between a woman with taste and a woman without it," thought the Duc de St. Louis, surveying the two; the Countess had a million or two of false curls in a tower above her pretty tiny face, was almost as decolletée as a Greuze picture, chirped the fashionable slang of the boulevards and salons in the shrillest and swiftest of voices, and poured forth slanders that were more diverting than decorous.

Lady Hilda was dressed like a picture of Marie Antoinette, in 1780; her rich hair was lifted from her low fair forehead in due keeping with her costume, she swept aside her cousin's naughty stories with as much tact as contempt, and spoke a French which Marie Antoinette could have recognised as the language in which Voltaire once