Description

"There is no help for it, I must do it today," the Baroness Melkweyser murmured with a sigh breathed into the depths of the toilet-glass, before which, she was sitting while her maid dressed her hair. "It is now just a week," she went on to herself, after having uttered the above words aloud, "quite one week since Capriani entrusted the affair to me. I have met him three times, and each time was obliged to tell him that there had been no favorable opportunity as yet. He is beginning to take my delay ill. Come, then, courage!.... en avant!....

She shrugged her shoulders as though shifting off all responsibility and turning to her maid exclaimed: "mais dépêchez vous donc, Euphrosine, will you never remember how much I always have to do!" Whereupon the impatient lady, snatched from her maid the headdress which she was arranging and, quite in the style of Napoleon I., crowned herself.