Excuse me--I comprehend your impatience.

I will tell you of whom _ces demoiselles_ consist.
You have heard me speak of my _cousine_ de Maisonrouge, that grande _belle femme_, who, after having married, _en secondes_ noces--there had been, to tell the truth, some irregularity about her first union--a venerable relic of the old noblesse of Poitou, was left, by the death of her husband, complicated by the indulgence of expensive tastes on an income of 17,000 francs, on the pavement of Paris, with two little demons of daughters to bring up in the path of virtue.

She managed to bring them up; my little cousins are rigidly virtuous.

If you ask me how she managed it, I can't tell you; it's no business of mine, and, _a fortiori_ none of yours.

She is now fifty years old (she confesses to thirty-seven), and her daughters, whom she has never been able to marry, are respectively twenty-seven and twenty-three (they confess to twenty and to seventeen).