Elfrida, when she wished to be exact with her vanity, told herself that it could not have been more than twenty-five minutes.
She wished for particular reasons to be exact with it now, and she did not fail to give proper weight to the fact that Frank Parke had never seen her before that day.
The Paris correspondent of the _Daily Dial_ was well enough known to be of the _monde_, and rich enough to be as bourgeois as anybody.

Therefore some of the people who knew him thought it odd that at his age this gentleman should prefer the indelicacies of the Quartier to those of "tout Paris," and the bad vermouth and cheap cigars of the Rue Luxembourg to the peculiarly excellent quality of champagne with which the president's wife made her social atonement to the Faubourg St.Germain.But it was so, and its being so rendered Frank Parke's opinion that Miss Bell could write if she chose to try, not only supremely valuable to her, but available for the second time if necessary, which was perhaps more important.
There would be a little more money from Sparta, perhaps one hundred and fifty dollars.

It would come in a week, and after that there would be none.

But a supply of it, however modest, must be arranged somehow--there were the "frais" of the atelier, to speak of nothing else.

The necessity was irritatingly absolute.