good-looking, and young. Why doesn't he dance? If I knew his name I could introduce him. In fact, if I knew him I could talk to him myself."
"Ah! I can tell you, my maman went to school with her youngest daughter, and then she was a woman; a woman of a very certain age in society."
The tall, angular, Tante Pauline talked all the time, shrugging her shoulders under her thin glacé-silk waist, tapping her sandal-wood fan, and gesticulating with her bony hands, in their loose black silk mittens.
"Ninety! Who would think it?"
"It is a miracle!"
"And so charming, so spirituelle!"
"A beautiful ball! Really like old times."
"Eh, Odile!" Tante Pauline spread her fan (rusting spangles on a ground of faded red silk) to shield what she was going to say to her companion.
"She ought to know how to give balls! She has given enough of them. That is the way she married off six daughters."
"Tante Pauline!"
