“Camille is coming directly,” she said to me. “The dressmaker is with her trying a dress on. The poor child is not very well to-day. Her profession, sir, is a very trying one, and she wants a rest already. We were wrong not to go to the seaside this year. Do you know Yport, sir? It is very pretty, and very quiet, but we have been there six summers. I like, when I go into the country, to go to a familiar place. You are so much better treated if you do, and feel more at home. When my dear husband was alive we spent two months every year in Switzerland. We always went on July 16 and came back on September 15. I have never been there since, for it would bring sad memories back to my mind. Have you come to talk to Camille about her portrait?” “Has she spoken about it to you then? She has not forgotten?” I said. “No, certainly not,” her mother answered, “and I was very pleased and astonished when she told me, for it is very difficult to get her to sit for her portrait. Did you think of showing Camille’s portrait at the annual exhibition of pictures? It will be an excellent thing, I think, for you, and not bad for her. We are waiting, before moving back to our old neighbourhood where we have a few friends, till Camille has signed a definite engagement. The Théâtre-Français has offered her one, but as they let her go after she had won two prizes, she has been advised to make them pay her a large salary now she is famous. I am willing for her to do so; but I tell her that the house of Moliére is to the other theatres what a great shop like the Louvre or the Bon Marché is to one belonging to a small retailer.” I am not quite sure I am reproducing these phrases in their right order. But on looking at them I am very sure of their tenor, and more so still of the mind which inspired them, as well as the phrases which followed. Poor Madam Favier was so simple as to be sometimes almost common, and so trusting as to be almost loquacious. Her mind was a very solid and sensible one and that of a woman who had retained her good sense through her ruin. This phenomenon is rarer even than sentiment in an actress. Usually these sudden falls from the Olympus of opulence have as a result a moral bewilderment which last for the rest of life. Ruined people seem to lose with their money every faculty of adaptation to the narrow circle of activity in which their social downfall imprisons them. It is particularly so when their wealth has only been an episode between two periods of poverty.