"Look at that, my dear John," she exclaimed--"another card to one of their everlasting bazaars! Why, it's at Madame d'Armillac's, the Prince's mother. Madame de Treymes must have sent it, of course. The brazen way in which they combine religion and immorality! Fifty francs admission--_rien que cela!_--to see some of the most disreputable people in Europe. And if you're an American, you're expected to leave at least a thousand behind you. Their own people naturally get off cheaper." She tossed over the card to her cousin. "There's your opportunity to see Madame de Treymes." "Make it two thousand, and she'll ask you to tea," Mr. Boykin scathingly added. V In the monumental drawing-room of the Hotel de Malrive--it had been a surprise to the American to read the name of the house emblazoned on black marble over its still more monumental gateway--Durham found himself surrounded by a buzz of feminine tea-sipping oddly out of keeping with the wigged and cuirassed portraits frowning high on the walls, the majestic attitude of the furniture, the rigidity of great gilt consoles drawn up like lords-in-waiting against the tarnished panels. It was the old Marquise de Malrive's "day," and Madame de Treymes, who lived with her mother, had admitted Durham to the heart of the enemy's country by inviting him, after his prodigal disbursements at the charity bazaar, to come in to tea on a Thursday. Whether, in thus fulfilling Mr. Boykin's prediction, she had been aware of Durham's purpose, and had her own reasons for falling in with it; or whether she simply wished to reward his lavishness at the fair, and permit herself another glimpse of an American so picturesquely embodying the type familiar to French fiction--on these points Durham was still in doubt. Meanwhile, Madame de Treymes being engaged with a venerable Duchess in a black shawl--all the older ladies present had the sloping shoulders of a generation of shawl-wearers--her American visitor, left in the isolation of his unimportance, was using it as a shelter for a rapid survey of the scene.