For three months it had been the reigning desire of her life to have La Jacquemerille for the winter; it had been let to an American millionnaire, and the apparent impossibility of getting it had naturally increased her anxiety. The American millionnaire had suddenly decided to go home; Jay Gould or Mr. Vanderbilt had done something that had disturbed his digestion, and La Jacquemerille, which she had never seen, but had fallen in love with from photographs, was granted to her wishes for the modest sum of forty thousand francs. She had travelled straight from the Krimea to it without stopping, had arrived by night, and now was looking at it for the first time in broad daylight with a sentiment very near akin to disgust. She did not find it the least like the photographs.
'It is so horridly low!' she exclaimed, after a long and thoughtful examination of the frontage, where an Ionic colonnade sheltered itself under a châlet roof from the Bernese Oberland. 'I am sure it will be most dreadfully cold. And just look at the architecture--every style under heaven! Was there ever such an extraordinary jumble?'
'If it be a jumble, my dear, it is very suitable to our generation; and you are very lucky if, when you buy a pig in a poke, you get nothing worse than a jumble,' said another lady who was sitting opposite to her, with a book held upside down and a litter of newspapers, and who was known in society as Lady Brancepeth.
'Pig in a poke! what is he?' said the Princess Napraxine in her pretty English, which she spoke with scarcely any foreign accent. 'The house is shocking! It is the Parthenon mixed up with a Gasthof. It is a nightmare;--and so small! I don't believe there is room for one quarter of the servants. And just look at these palms with their heads tied up as if they had neuralgia; and I am sure they may well have it, standing still in that _bise_, day and night. I think the whole place utterly odious. I will tell the women to unpack nothing; I am sure I shall not stay a night; an Italian _villino_ with a shingle roof and Grindenwald balconies! Can anything be so absurd?'
'I suppose you will wait till the Prince comes downstairs?' said Lady Brancepeth with a little yawn.