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ON HIS WAY THROUGH THE WORLD 327
pugning the Baroness's moral character. People said she had no
right to the title of Baroness at all, or to the noble foreign name of
Smolensk. People are still alive who knew her under a different
name. The Baroness herself was what some amateurs call a fine
woman, especially at dinner-time, when she appeared in black satin
and with cheeks that blushed up as far as the eyelids. In her
peignoir in the morning, she was perhaps the reverse of fine.
Contours which were round at night, in the forenoon appeared lean
and angular. Her roses only bloomed half-an-hour before dinnertime
on a cheek which was quite yellow until five o'clock. I am
sure it is very kind of elderly and ill-complexioned people to supply
the ravages of time or jaundice, and present to our view a figure
blooming and agreeable, in place of an object faded and withered.
Do you quarrel with your opposite neighbour for painting his house
front or putting roses in his balcony ? You are rather thankful for
the adornment. Madame de Smolensk's front was so decorated of
afternoons. Geraniums were set pleasantly under those first-floor
windows, her eyes. Carcel lamps beamed from those windows:
lamps which she had trimmed with her own scissors, and into which
that poor widow poured the oil which she got somehow and anyhow.
When the dingy breakfast papillotes were cast of an afternoon,
what beautiful black curls appeared round her brow ! The dingy
papillotes were put away in the drawer : the peignoir retired to
its hook behind the door: the satin raiment came forth, the
shining, the ancient, the well-kept, the well-wadded: and at the
same moment the worthy woman took that smile out of some
cunning box on her scanty toilet-table—that smile which she wore
all the evening along with the rest of her toilette, and took out
of her mouth when she went to bed and to think—to think how
both ends were to be made to meet.
Philip said he respected and admired that woman : and worthy
of respect she was in her way. She painted her face and grinned
at poverty. She laughed and rattled with care gnawing at her
side. She had to coax the milkman out of his human kindness :
to pour oil—his own oil—upon the stormy épicier's soul : to melt
the butterman: to tap the wine merchant ; to mollify the butcher :
to invent new pretexts for the landlord: to reconcile the ladyboarders,
Mrs. General Baynes, let us say, and the Honourable
Mrs. Boldero, who were always quarrelling : to see that the dinner,
when procured, was cooked properly ; that Francois, to whom she
owed ever so many months' wages, was not too rebellious or intoxicated
; that Auguste, also her creditor, had his glass clean and
his lamps in order. And this work done and the hour of six o'clock
arriving, she had to carve and be agreeable to her table; not to