She added, _sotto voce_: "Pour assurer votre salut la-haut, on ferait bien de vous bruler toute vive ici-bas." I laughed, as, indeed, it was impossible to do otherwise.
* * * * * Has the reader forgotten Miss Ginevra Fanshawe?
If so, I must be allowed to re-introduce that young lady as a thriving pupil of Madame Beck's; for such she was.

On her arrival in the Rue Fossette, two or three days after my sudden settlement there, she encountered me with very little surprise.

She must have had good blood in her veins, for never was any duchess more perfectly, radically, unaffectedly _nonchalante_ than she: a weak, transient amaze was all she knew of the sensation of wonder.

Most of her other faculties seemed to be in the same flimsy condition: her liking and disliking, her love and hate, were mere cobweb and gossamer; but she had one thing about her that seemed strong and durable enough, and that was--her selfishness.
She was not proud; and--_bonne d'enfants_ as I was--she would forthwith have made of me a sort of friend and confidant.

She teased me with a thousand vapid complaints about school-quarrels and household economy: the cookery was not to her taste; the people about her, teachers and pupils, she held to be despicable, because they were foreigners.