Her likeness to Fanny, too, was very apparent, there were but two years
in time between them, ... though so many other things.... She had never
noticed it so clearly, not even when they were children. The same blue
eyes, with their sudden oblique look; in Corinne it was disturbing,
in Fanny devastating. The same pale, shining hair, the same fine nose;
only in Fanny all was more accented, more complete. Her eyes were
bigger and bluer, her hair yellower and thicker, her complexion more
dazzling, the oval of her face more perfect. Yet Corinne ... her face
had not indeed the glitter of Fanny's blinding, noonday beauty, but its
moonbeam charm was forever working its own pale magic....
Then the half chicken for each with its little round mound of rice was
brought on, and though Pauli took out his glass to look at his, and
speculated on the evidently not distant hour of its hatching, still it
was quite delicious, and that shining gravy over the rice!
"I'm speculating in everything," he continued vigorously, "I've joined
the Black Bourse Brigade, it's where you pick up trillions," and with
an airy gesture he pulled out a wallet and showed Tante Ilde some
magic-working dollars and some potent English pounds, but which last in
a subtle way gave place to the noisier charm of the dollars.
"Everybody speculates," he went on, "the lift boys in the hotels, the
porters at the stations, the old women selling newspapers. Everybody.
It's in the air."
Then as they were finishing the last of the rice and gravy, with little
crumbs of bread added so that not a bit should be lost, Corinne gave
voice slowly to what she had in mind, looking narrowly, slantingly at
Pauli:
"Tante Ilde is going to Fanny's tomorrow for her dinner."
"To Fanny's tomorrow?" he questioned in an astonishment that caused
Tante Ilde's face to flush a deep rose. To Pauli's way of thinking
though a good many things were done, certain others weren't. Tante
Ilde's going to Fanny's clearly fell under the latter head. Saints and
sinners were mostly all the same to him. One could rarely tell which
was which anyway, but somehow this....
"Fanny is so good to us--I don't think she always has it,--as easy as
it seems," she faltered, feeling quite uncomfortable, not because she
was going, but because of Pauli's strange look.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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