The devout
Clementina could take care of herself. With her face, the Baroness
reflected, she would be safe among Cossacks; besides, she could go
into a retreat, and stay there, if necessary. Sabina was quite
different.
The Princess thought so too, as it turned out. Sabina took the visitor
to her mother's door, knocked, opened and then went away, still
pressing her dead canary to her bosom, and infinitely glad to be alone
with it at last.
There was confusion in the Princess Conti's bedroom, the amazing
confusion which boils up about an utterly careless woman of the great
world, if she be accidentally left without a maid for twenty-four
hours. It seemed as if everything the Princess possessed in the way of
clothes, necessary and unnecessary, had been torn from wardrobes and
chests of drawers by a cyclone and scattered in every direction, till
there was not space to move or sit down in a room which was thirty
feet square.
Princess Conti was a very stout woman of about the same age as her
visitor, but not resembling her in the least. She had been beautiful,
and still kept the dazzling complexion and magnificent eyes for which
she had been famous. It was her boast that she slept eight hours every
night, without waking, whatever happened, and she always advised
everybody to do the same, with an airy indifference to possibilities
which would have done credit to a doctor.
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