CHAPTER XLIX
If only Marise would go away, would go away and give her a chance, thought Eugenia despairingly, coming slowly into her sitting-room where Mlle. Vallet sat writing in her journal. Joséphine heard the door close and hurried in with her quick silent step to take off her mistress' wraps.
"Mademoiselle looks so tired after these long walks!" she said solicitously, scrutinizing with a professional expertness the color of the young face. "I don't think they agree with Mademoiselle at all. This climate is too soft to walk about so. Nobody does. Mademoiselle might—without presuming to advise—Mademoiselle might be wiser to go in cabs."
Eugenia held out her arms as Joséphine slipped off her pretty, fawn-colored silk coat and then let them fall at her sides. She was thinking, "Cabs! What would he say to some one who went everywhere in cabs!"
"Oh!" cried Joséphine. "Those abominable ruins! Mademoiselle's dear little bronze shoes! Cut to pieces! Oh, Mlle. Vallet, just look at our poor Mademoiselle's shoes, the beautiful bronze ones. And there's no replacing them in the shops of this country!"
Mlle. Vallet tipped her head forward to look seriously over her steel-rimmed spectacles, agreed seriously that there was certainly very little left of the pretty bronze shoes, and went seriously back to writing with her sharp steel pen a detailed description of her expedition to the Catacombs. Mlle. Vallet was a very happy woman in those days. To be in Rome, after years of grinding drudgery in the class-room, to be free to look and wander and observe at her leisure for so much of the day—she often told Eugenia that she had never in her wildest dreams supposed she would have such an opportunity! She studied and sight-saw with conscientious and absorbed exactitude, and wrote down voluminous accounts of every day's
