Dora was almost always taken up by visitors, and he had scarcely any direct conversation with her. She was there, and he was glad she was there, and she knew he was glad (he knew that), but this was almost all the communion he had with her. She was mild, exquisitely mild--this was the term he mentally applied to her now--and it amply sufficed him, with the conviction he had that she was not stupid. She attended to the tea (for Mademoiselle Bourde was not always free), she handed the _petits fours_, she rang the bell when people went out; and it was in connection with these offices that the idea came to him once--he was rather ashamed of it afterward--that she was the Cinderella of the house, the domestic drudge, the one for whom there was no career, as it was useless for the Marquise to take up her case. He was ashamed of this fancy, I say, and yet it came back to him; he was even surprised that it had not occurred to him before. Her sisters were neither ugly nor proud (Tishy, indeed, was almost touchingly delicate and timid, with exceedingly pretty points, yet with a little appealing, old-womanish look, as if, small--very small--as she was, she was afraid she shouldn't grow any more); but her mother, like the mother in the fairy-tale, was a _femme forte_. Madame de Brives could do nothing for Dora, not absolutely because she was too plain, but because she would never lend herself, and that came to the same thing. Her mother accepted her as recalcitrant, but Cousin Maria's attitude, at the best, could only be resignation. She would respect her child's preferences, she would never put on the screw; but this would not make her love the child any more. So Raymond interpreted certain signs, which at the same time he felt to be very slight, while the conversation in Mrs. Temperly's _salon_ (this was its preponderant tendency) rambled among questions of bric-a-brac, of where Tishy's portrait should be placed when it was finished, and the current prices of old Gobelins. _Ces dames_ were not in the least above the discussion of prices.