I was petrified. But distrust is slow to depart, when it has once been admitted. “A Blue, then--who studies Aristotle, I warrant, and criticizes Plato! who keeps a journal in Hebrew, and scribbles notes in the arrow-headed writing! She has, I doubt not, an album--full of doggerel compliments and pen-and-ink drawings, a cabinet of shells and fossils, a museum of butterflies and beetles! After all, the days were blest when women attempted nothing beyond embroidery and the making of puddings!” And with these charitable reflections I sat down to dinner. There was at table a detestable story-teller; I have met him often since, and have heard his fifty-nine stories fifty-nine times over; but on this occasion it was as much as he could do to get through one of them. It was about an _omelette soufflée_: how he was very partial to an _omelette soufflée_; how he ate an _omelette soufflée_ seven times a week in Paris; how he never tasted a good _omelette soufflée_ out of France except once; how a very romantic incident belonged to that _omelette soufflée_; how it was composed by a beauty--an heiress of sixteen; how she had studied the whole theory of an _omelette soufflée_ for her father’s gratification, because the old man could not live without an _omelette soufflée_. This tale, interrupted of course by the usual accidents which disturb at a dinner-table the most experienced narrator, concluded by a rhapsody concerning filial duty, and her who was the gastronomical example of its excellence--Adèle Lepicq.