It was Lord Castlecourt’s custom to go to Paris two or three times every year. He had a sister married there of whom he was very fond, and he and her husband would go off shooting boars to a place with a name I can’t remember. My lady was always happy to go to Paris. She’d say she loved it, and the theaters, and the shops--tho what she could see in it _I_ never understood. A dirty, messy city, and full of men ready to ogle an honest, Christian woman, as if she was what half the women look like that go prancing along the streets. My lady spent a good deal of her time at the dressmakers, and she and I were forever going up to top stories in little, silly lifts that go up of themselves. I’d a great deal rather have walked than trusted myself to such unsafe, French contrivances--underhand, dangerous things, that might burst at any moment, _I_ say. The year before the time I am writing of we went to Paris, as usual, in March. We stopped at the Bristol, and stayed one month. My lady went out a great deal, and between-whiles was, as usual, at what they call there “_couturières’_,” at the jewelers’, or the shops on the Rue de la Paix. She also bought from Bolkonsky, the furrier, a very smart jacket of Russian sable that I’ll be bound cost a pretty penny. When we went back to London for the season her beauty and her costumes were the talk of the town. Old Lady Bundy’s maid told me that Lady Bundy went about saying: “And but for me, she’d be the mother of the red-headed larrykins of an Irish squireen!” Which didn’t seem to me nice talk for a lady. We spent that summer at Castlecourt Marsh Manor very quietly, as was my lord’s wish. My lady did not seem in as good spirits as usual, which I set down to the country life that she always said bored her. Once or twice she told me that she felt ill, which I’d never known her to say before, and one day in the late summer I discovered her in tears. She did not seem to be herself again till we went to Paris in September. Then she brightened up, and was soon in higher spirits than ever. She was on the go continually--often would go out for lunch, and not be back till it was time to dress for dinner. She enjoyed herself in Paris very much, she told me. And I think she did, for I never saw her more animated--almost excited with high spirits and success. The following spring we left Castlecourt Marsh Manor, and, as I said before, came to Burridge’s on April the third. The season was soon in full swing, and my lady was going out morning, noon, and night. There was no end to it, and I was worn out. When she was away in the afternoon I’d take forty winks on the sofa, and have Sara Dwight, the housemaid of our rooms, bring me a cup of tea, when she’d sometimes take one herself, and we’d gossip a bit over it.