And so, day after day the ladies would come together, and, laughingly, ask one another: "Any news?" But on the evening after the Princesse de Luxembourg's call the magistrate's wife laid a finger on her lips. "I've discovered something." "Oh, isn't Mme. Poncin simply wonderful? I never saw anyone. . . . But do tell us! What has happened?" "Just listen to this. A woman with yellow hair and six inches of paint on her face and a carriage like a--you could _smell_ it a mile off; which only a creature like that would dare to have--came here to-day to call on the Marquise, by way of!" "Oh-yow-yow! Tut-tut-tut-tut. Did you ever! Why, it must be that woman we saw--you remember, Leader,--we said at the time we didn't at all like the look of her, but we didn't know that it was the 'Marquise' she'd come to see. A woman with a nigger-boy, you mean?" "That's the one." "D'you mean to say so? You don't happen to know her name?" "Yes, I made a mistake on purpose; I picked up her card; she _trades_ under the name of the 'Princesse de Luxembourg'! Wasn't I right to have my doubts about her? It's a nice thing to have to mix promiscuously with a Baronne d'Ange like that?" The barrister quoted Mathurin Régnier's _Macette_ to the chief magistrate. It must not, however, be supposed that this misunderstanding was merely temporary, like those that occur in the second act of a farce to be cleared up before the final curtain. Mme. de Luxembourg, a niece of the King of England and of the Emperor of Austria, and Mme. de Villeparisis, when one called to take the other for a drive, did look like nothing but two "old trots" of the kind one has always such difficulty in avoiding at a watering-place. Nine tenths of the men of the Faubourg Saint-Germain appear to the average man of the middle class simply as alcoholic wasters (which, individually, they not infrequently are) whom, therefore, no respectable person would dream of asking to dinner. The middle class fixes its standard, in this respect, too high, for the feelings of these men would never prevent their being received with every mark of esteem in houses which it, the middle class, may never enter. And so sincerely do they believe that the middle class knows this that they affect a simplicity in speaking of their own affairs and a tone of disparagement of their friends, especially when they are "at the coast", which make the misunderstanding complete. If, by any chance, a man of the fashionable world is kept in touch with "business people" because, having more money than he knows what to do with, he finds himself elected chairman of all sorts of important financial concerns, the business man who at last sees a nobleman worthy, he considers, to rank with "big business", would take his oath that such a man can have no dealings with the Marquis ruined by gambling whom the said business man supposes to be all the more destitute of friends the more friendly he makes himself.