She opened a work-basket on the table, and from a chaos of reels of cotton, tapes and buttons, and shreds and patches, extracted half-a-dozen letters, which she tossed across the table to Desrolles. ‘Do you leave your love-letters where your husband might so easily find them?’ asked Desrolles, wonderfully. ‘Do you suppose he would give himself the trouble to look at them?’ she cried scornfully. ‘Not he. He has so long left off caring for me himself, that he never supposes that anybody else can fall in love with me. Help yourself to that cognac, Monsieur Desrolles. It is the only safe drink in this miserable climate of yours; and put some coals on the fire, _mon bonhomme_. I am frozen to the marrow of my bones.’ La Chicot filled her glass by way of setting a good example, and emptied it as placidly as if the brandy had been sugar and water. Desrolles looked over the letters she had handed him. They all went to the same tune. They told La Chicot that she was beautiful, and that the writer was madly in love with her. They offered her a carriage, a house in Mayfair, a settlement. The offers rose in value with the lapse of time. ‘How have you answered him?’ asked Desrolles, curious and interested. ‘Not at all. I knew better how to make myself valued. Let him wait for his answer.’ ‘A man must be very hard hit to write like that,’ suggested the gentleman. La Chicot shrugged her statuesque shoulders. She was lovely even in her more than careless attire. She wore a long loose dressing-gown of scarlet cashmere, girdled with a cord and tassels, which she tied and untied, and twisted and untwisted in sheer idleness. Her massy hair was rolled in a great rough knob at the back of her head, ready to escape from the comb and slide down her back at the slightest provocation. The dead white of her complexion showed like marble against the scarlet robe, the dense hair showed raven black above the pale brow and large luminous eyes. ‘Is he as rich as he pretends to be?’ asked La Chicot, thoughtfully swinging the heavy scarlet tassel, and lazily contemplating the fire. ‘To my certain knowledge,’ said Mr. Desrolles, with an oracular air, ‘Joseph Lemuel is one of the wealthiest men in London.’ ‘I don’t see that it much matters,’ said La Chicot, meditatively. ‘I like money, but so long as I have enough to buy what I want, it’s all that I care about, and I don’t like that grim-looking Jew.’ ‘Compare a house in Mayfair with this den,’ urged Desrolles. ‘Where is Mayfair?’ Desrolles described the neighbourhood. ‘A wilderness of dull streets,’ said La Chicot, with a contemptuous shrug. ‘What is one street better than another? I should like a house in the Champs Elysées--a house in a garden, dazzling white, all over flowers, with big, shining windows, and a Swiss stable.’ ‘A house like a toy,’ said Desrolles. ‘Well, Lemuel could buy you one as easily as I could buy you a handful of sugar plums. You have but to say the word.’