"English!" she murmured to herself, with an almost imperceptible but sufficiently scornful elevation of her arched eyebrows, and a slight smile, just showing her white teeth, as I addressed her in French; and she answered me with the ease, the aplomb, the ever suave courtesy of a woman of the world, with that polish which gives the most common subjects a brilliance never their own, and that vivacity which confers on the merest trifles a spell to amuse and to charm. She was certainly a very lovely creature, and a very charming one, too; frank, animated, witty, with the tone of a woman who has seen the world and knows it. Dunbar adored her, at first sight; he is an inflammable fellow, and has been ignited a thousand times at far less provocation. Maréchale prepared for himself fifty conjugal orations by the recklessness with which, under the very eyes of madame, he devoted himself to another woman. Even Albany Protocol, dull, somnolent, and superior to such weaknesses, as becomes a president of many boards and a chairman of many committees, opened his eyes and glanced at her; and some young Cantabs and artists at the other end of the table stopped their own conversation, envying Dunbar and myself, I believe, for our juxtaposition with the _belle inconnue_; while my sisters sat trifling with the wing of a pigeon, in voluntary starvation (they would have had nothing to complain of, you see, if they had suffered themselves to dine well!), with strong disapprobation marked upon their lineaments, of this lovely vivacious unknown, whoever she might be, talking exclusively to each other, with a certain expression of sarcastic disdain and offended virtue, hinting far more forcibly than words that they thought already the "very worst" of her. So severe, indeed, did they look, that Dunbar, who is a good-natured fellow, and thinks--and thinks justly--that Constance and Agneta are very fine women, left me to discuss, Hoffmann, Heine, and the rest of Germany's satirical poets, with my opposite neighbor, and endeavored to thaw my sisters; a very difficult matter when once those ladies are iced. He tried Paris, but only elicited a monosyllabic remark concerning its weather; he tried Vicq d'Azyr, and was rewarded for his trouble by a withering sarcasm on the unlucky Toison d'Or; he tried chit-chat on mutual acquaintances, and the unhappy people he chanced to name were severally dismissed with a cutting satire appended to each. Lady Maréchale and Mrs. Protocol were in one of those freezing and unassailable moods in which they sealed a truce with one another, and, combining their forces against a common foe, dealt out sharp, spherical, hard-hitting little bullets of speech from behind the abatis in which they intrenched themselves.