“Naturally you will put on all your best dresses, for the theatre, for the garden party, or a ball, all your jewels en _grande toilette_, and the little time which will remain at your disposal you will use to change your costume, your hat, or your gloves--five times a day.”
“Does all that seem amusing to you?” she asked expressionlessly.
“Tell me the other way, Marco, to enable me to judge.”
“To enable you to choose, dear Minerva, the other way is: to arrive and remain perfectly incognito; to let the proud and ferocious Duchess of Altomonte go, let all the relations and friends go; not to place, and prevent it from being placed, any notice of our arrival in the papers; to live in perfect obscurity and liberty, only going where we wish, only frequenting the places where we wish to amuse ourselves freely, going for excursions in the neighbourhood of Paris, especially those of beauty, poetry, and freshness, from Fontainebleau to Saint Germain, from Chantilly to Enghien--true idylls, Vittoria. Otherwise than the Imperial salon, dry and hard as the Duchess of Altomonte, who has been infesting it for the last forty years! In fact a life gay and sympathetic, especially free, without a single boring or heavy duty.”
Vittoria lowered her eyes wrapped in thought, then she asked--
“I suppose you have always, or nearly always, visited Paris in the second way?”
“Well then, Marco,” she replied coldly and drily, “I choose the first way. It seems more proper to me.”
“You are right, Minerva; let it be so!” he exclaimed, even more coldly.
Seated in an arm-chair of the most upright Empire style, a carved curial chair of darkest mahogany, with bronze bosses and ornaments, cushioned in a myrtle pattern, Vittoria sat upright before her Great Aunt and kept respectful silence. The bride in this third and last visit to the Duchess of Altomonte, a visit of thanks and farewell, wore a rich dress of pleated silver, gay with handsome embroidery; in her little ears she wore solitaires, a large hat with a silver-grey feather on her blond tresses, and amid the lace of her corsage an antique necklace of diamonds and emeralds. She was dressed so luxuriously because, on the first visit made to the proud and austere Bourbon _grande dame_, the Duchess had suddenly observed to her nephew that his wife was dressed too humbly, and not suitably to her position and the visit she had come to make.