Page:A M Williamson - The Motor Maid.djvu/42

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.

CHAPTER III

YOU will have to go back to the cousins you 've been living with in Paris," pronounced Lady Kilmarny. "You're much too young and pretty to be anywhere alone."

"I can't go on living with them unless I promise to marry Monsieur Charretier," I explained. "I 'd rather scrub floors than marry Monsieur Charretier."

"You 'd never finish one floor. The second would finish you. I thought French girls—well, then, half French girls—usually let their people arrange their marriages."

"Perhaps I 'm not usual. I hope Monsieur Charretier is n't."

"Is he such a monster?"

"He is fat, especially in all the places he ought n't to be fat. And old. But worse than his embonpoint and his nose, he made his money in—you could never guess."

"I see by your face, my poor child: it was Liver Pills."

"Something far more dreadful."

"Are there lower depths?"

"There are—Corn Plasters."

"Oh, my dear, you are quite right! You couldn't marry him."

28