Page:The fortunes of Fifi (IA fortunesoffifi00seawiala).pdf/56

 settle anything in the world, from a new part in a play, to the way to make onion soup, without consulting Cartouche? So the question of a husband was full of complications for Fifi. At last, however, a brilliant solution burst upon her mind: she would have a great many flirtations—and then she would marry Cartouche!

Fifi was charmed with her own cleverness in devising this plan. It occurred to her at the very moment that she was putting on her hat with the black feathers to go out and buy herself a warm cloak. It was Christmas Eve, late in the wintry afternoon, and she had time, before she was due at the theater, to run around the corner to a shop where she had seen a beautiful cloak for thirty francs. She had saved up exactly thirty francs in the month since that stupendous evening when she had seen both the Pope and the Emperor.

The bargain for the cloak was quite completed; both she and Cartouche had examined it critically, had made the shopman take off a franc for a solitary button which was not quite right, and nothing remained but to pay over the thirty francs. It was a beautiful cloak, of a rich, dark red, lined with flannel—there was one like it, lined with cot