The Princesse de Cammora’s “Five-o’clock” was exhausting itself, Madeline Frémont of the Comédie Française having just departed, also the Duchesse M—— de M——, the wheels of whose barouche had a moment ago rumbled away round the corner of the Rue de Courcelles. Nothing was left now but for the remaining few to take their departure. There was nothing to keep them, yet they clung after the fashion of grounds to the bottom of a coffee-cup. There were three ancient dames and an old Marquis, all relics of the Empire, all boring each other to death, and lingering on in the dim hope of being asked to dinner. A pretty girl in furs and picture hat stood at one of the windows, her furs thrown open, and her eyes fixed meditatively upon the street. M. le Marquis Sobrahon de Nani was explaining to two old Empire women the difference between the Comédie Française now and “then,” whilst the Princesse de Cammora sat near the tea-table with its little cups and dishes of _petits fours_ and what-nots, conversing volubly with another Princesse, painted, after the fashion of her hostess, with the roses of eighteen on the parchment of fifty. “I should never have called him Toto,” wailed the Princesse de Cammora, whilst the girl at the window pricked her ears beneath her picture hat, and seemed more than ever absorbed by the Boulevard Haussmann. “It was the wretched _Nounou’s_ fault; she came from Tarbes. Really, if I had known the worry of nurses, I would never have had a child. She stole everything she could lay her hands upon—my bracelets, my rings, the drops off the grand chandelier; everything was found in her box; it was like the nest of a magpie. She spoke as if she held pins in her mouth, and she could never pronounce the name Désiré, so she called him Toto. Her husband was an Italian from Ventimiglia, and he was called Toto, and so it pleased the good God that my child should receive this outrageous nickname. Everyone calls him Toto now, and the wretched boy, when I accuse him of his wildnesses, throws the name in my teeth, and asks me how he can live seriously with such a pug-dog name attached to him. I assure you, my dear Mathilde, the amounts I have paid during the last month would horrify you—_bills_ that he has run up! Oh, no, never give a child a thoughtless name! I assure you, in this world _things often begin in jest which end very much in earnest_. If you could only guess one-half of this mad boy’s wickedness and absurd”—here the other Princesse made a grimace at Helen Powers, the American millionairess in the picture hat, as if to say, “She is listening”—“and absurd good-nature!” resumed the mother of Toto, snapping her scent-bottle lid—“wickednesses without a particle of real wickedness in them, but none the less annoying to a mother for that. Only the other night he came home without any money. It seems he had met a poor old woman near the Madeleine, and for a freak upset the basket of apples she was