"Oh, she picked them up for nothing, in corners of whatever province she happened to be in, out of barns and chicken-houses and attics." Eugenia said complainingly, "It seems to me she always has been able to pick up something for nothing. Look at her husband." Marise said over her shoulder, "Oh, she didn't get much, when she got him. He never would have been anything except his good looks, if she hadn't taken him up. And she didn't get him for nothing--not much! Mlle. Hasparren says--every one who knows them says--that she made him. She writes his speeches now. I've seen her. And never bothers him by being jealous." "I should hope _not_," commented Eugenia. "She's ages older than he. And he's such a ripping good-looker." Marise found Eugenia's fervent accent rather distasteful. Not that she minded her latest fad of finding married men so much more interesting subjects than the others. Eugenia's affairs never lasted more than a minute anyhow. But she wished Eugenia would pick out somebody with more brains than Mme. Vallery's husband, somebody not so well satisfied with himself. "He's an awful imbecile," she said. "What did Mme. Vallery marry him for, if she's so terribly intelligent?" challenged Eugenia. She delighted in using the words she had formerly mis-pronounced, and giving them the purest, most colorless intonation. There was not a trace now, in her speech, of the sweet, thick, unstrained honey of her original southern accent. "She has brains for two," said Marise shortly, displeased by the direction of the talk. As a matter of fact, Mme. Vallery had once informed her why she had married her handsome, unintelligent husband. She had said warningly one day, when Marise had drawn back from a match Mme. Vallery had proposed for her, "Don't carry that too far, dear child. You will have to give in to the flesh sooner or later. You might as well do it young, before the growth of your intelligence spoils your enjoyment of it, as wait till you're driven to it, as I was. It's not amusing in the least, to have to take it all mixed with the contempt of your brains. You'll find you have to take your share, one way or another." Marise looked out frowningly at a great beech tree bursting into life in the garden across the street. It held its huge, flowering crest proudly into the spring air. To look at it was like hearing a flourish of trumpets, triumphal, exulting. That was all very well for trees, thought Marise, that stupid, yearly emergence into a life that promised so much and brought futility. Along the gravel-walk, inside the Luxembourg, under the hedge of lilacs, under the new splendor of the great beech, a young man and a girl in a pale gray dress were strolling. They looked at each other, and smiled.