When I go every Wednesday to be bored to death in her salon with a crowd of affected, simpering women!" She did not say that those same Wednesdays of Madame Fromont's were very useful to her, that they were like a weekly journal of fashion, one of those composite little publications in which you are told how to enter and to leave a room, how to bow, how to place flowers in a jardiniere and cigars in a case, to say nothing of the engravings, the procession of graceful, faultlessly attired men and women, and the names of the best modistes.

Nor did Sidonie add that she had entreated all those friends of Claire's, of whom she spoke so scornfully, to come to see her on her own day, and that the day was selected by them.
Will they come?
Will Madame Fromont Jeune insult Madame Risler Aine by absenting herself on her first Friday?
The thought makes her almost feverish with anxiety.
"For heaven's sake, hurry!" she says again and again.

"Good heavens! how long you are at your, breakfast!" It is a fact that it is one of honest Risler's ways to eat slowly, and to light his pipe at the table while he sips his coffee.

To-day he must renounce these cherished habits, must leave the pipe in its case because of the smoke, and, as soon as he has swallowed the last mouthful, run hastily and dress, for his wife insists that he must come up during the afternoon and pay his respects to the ladies.
What a sensation in the factory when they see Risler Aine come in, on a week-day, in a black frock-coat and white cravat! "Are you going to a wedding, pray ?" cries Sigismond, the cashier, behind his grating.
And Risler, not without a feeling of pride, replies: "This is my wife's reception day!" Soon everybody in the place knows that it is Sidonie's day; and Pere Achille, who takes care of the garden, is not very well pleased to find that the branches of the winter laurels by the gate are broken.
Before taking his seat at the table upon which he draws, in the bright light from the tall windows, Risler has taken off his fine frock-coat, which embarrasses him, and has turned up his clean shirt-sleeves; but the idea that his wife is expecting company preoccupies and disturbs him; and from time to time he puts on his coat and goes up to her.
"Has no one come ?" he asks timidly.
"No, Monsieur, no one." In the beautiful red drawing-room--for they have a drawing-room in red damask, with a console between the windows and a pretty table in the centre of the light-flowered carpet--Sidonie has established herself in the attitude of a woman holding a reception, a circle of chairs of many shapes around her.

Here and there are books, reviews, a little work-basket in the shape of a gamebag, with silk tassels, a bunch of violets in a glass vase, and green plants in the jardinieres.