"What have you been telling your sister ?" Noemi threatened to leave her.

Jeanne clasped her hands in supplication, and asked, looking her straight in the eyes, as though to read her soul: "How shall I arrange my hair?
How shall I dress ?" Noemi answered thoughtlessly: "Why, just as you please." Jeanne stamped her foot angrily.

Noemi understood.
"As a peasant girl," said she.
"You silly creature!" Noemi laughed.
Jeanne sighed out the usual reproach: "You do not love me! You do not love me!" Then Noemi became serious, and asked her if she really wished to entice him back again--her precious Maironi?
"I want to be beautiful!" Jeanne exclaimed.

"There!" She really was beautiful at that moment, in her dressing-gown of a warm yellow tint, with her streaming dark hair down to a hand's-breadth below her waist.

She looked far lovelier and younger than the night before.
Her eyes shone with that look of intense animation which, in former days, they had been wont to assume when Maironi entered the room, or even when she heard his step outside.
"I wish I had the _toilette_ I wore at Praglia," she said.