Page:The Old Countess (1927).pdf/42

 appraise,' she said: 'I must apologize to you, Madame, for the hovel in which you find me. I am very poor—disastrously poor—and I have found what refuge I could.'

'But I don't call this a hovel,' said Jill, looking thoughtfully at her; she was still occupied with her sense of difficult reconstruction. 'I call it rather grand. We live in hotels, usually, and have no real home at all.'

'This is a hotel to me. This is not my home. I rent it, merely, from a landlady who is also in summer my housekeeper, and who has just gone away—to Bordeaux; otherwise you would find me in a better state for welcoming you.' The old lady's eyes, as she spoke, fell on the kitchen bowl and she promptly picked it up and placed it out of sight on the other side of her chair. 'I spend my winter quite alone here, but for my maitre d'hôtel and a peasant woman who comes in to care for me.'

'This isn't your own setting, then,' said Graham; and Madame de Lamouderie's eyes left Jill to dwell on him with overt delight. 'I thought it all went with you.'

 ' Mais non; mais non, '  said the old lady, correcting his ingenuous error almost tenderly. 'If you knew France better you would recognize in this the setting of the enriched petite bourgeoisie as it climbs towards the haute. My own home, in childhood, was one of the most princely châteaux of Normandy, and for many years, in Paris, my salon was celebrated for its splen-