CHAPTER XXXIX
Paris, May, 1907.
"Wouldn't you think," asked Eugenia, looking about her, "that anybody who could get up such a room as this, such a perfect room, would know how to get herself up better?"
"You don't suppose for a minute that she doesn't know how to!" Marise rejoined. She added after a moment, to tease Eugenia, "Perhaps she thinks it ordinary to be chic. Perhaps she thinks it is more distinguished to have her very own genre."
Eugenia said with a nettled accent, "Well, wouldn't you think if she were going in for a genre of her own, she'd pick out one that was a little more ornamental than her flat-chested, old-maid, provincial school-teacher variety?"
Marise laughed. It always gave her a little malicious amusement to make Eugenia uneasy. To make her still more so, she added, "Yet you know well enough, Eugenia, in any room full of people, let Mme. Vallery come in with that mild, oh-I'm-nobody, don't-mind-me sort of air of hers, and everybody else looks like a dressmaker's mannequin."
Eugenia, alarmed for her standards, annoyed and aroused, disputed the point with warmth, "That's only because you know who she is. If you didn't, you'd take her for the concierge's country cousin."
Marise shook her head exasperatingly, "No you wouldn't. She has cachet. You can see it a mile away."
Eugenia suddenly conceded the point with grudging wonder, "How does she do it?" she marveled, unreconciled.
"Personality," diagnosed Marise, and then seeing that Eugenia's face looked really clouded, she stopped her teasing abruptly, ashamed of the unkind impulse which drove her to
