Page:The Reverberator (2nd edition, American issue, London and New York, Macmillan & Co., 1888).djvu/93

Rh she said to Gaston, while she turned her head this way and that as she stood before Francie's image. "She looks like a piece of sculpture—or something cast in silver—of the time of Francis the First; something of Jean Goujon or Germain Pilon." The young men exchanged a glance, for this happened to be a capital comparison, and Gaston replied, in a detached way, that she was well worth seeing.

He went in to have a cup of tea with his sister on the day he knew she would have paid her second visit to the studio, and the first words she greeted him with were "But she is admirable—votre petite—admirable, admirable!" There was a lady calling in the Place Beauvau at the moment—old Mine. d'Outreville, and she naturally asked who was the object of such enthusiasm. Gaston suffered Susan to answer this question; he wanted to hear what she would say. She described the girl almost as well as he would have done, from the point of view of the plastic, with a hundred technical and critical terms, and the old lady listened in silence, solemnly, rather coldly, as if she thought such talk a good deal of a galimatias: she belonged to the old-fashioned school and held that a young lady was sufficiently catalogued when it was said that she had a dazzling complexion or the finest eyes in the world.

"Qu'est-ce que c'est que cctte merveille?" she inquired; to which Mme. de Brécourt replied