Colette imagined herself under the same circumstances, making the most of a slain lover, with a crape veil covering her fair hair, her mourning copied from that of her divorced sister, who wore her weeds so charmingly, but who was getting rather tired of a single life.

As for Miss Kate Sparks and Miss Nora, they could not understand why the breaking of half-a-dozen hearts should not be the prelude to every marriage.  That, they said with much conviction, was always the case in America, and a girl was thought all the more of who had done so.

Jacqueline, however, thought more than was reasonable about the dangers that the friend of her childhood was going to encounter through her fault.  Fred’s departure would have lent him a certain prestige, had not a powerful new interest stepped in to divert her thoughts.  Madame d’Avrigny was getting up her annual private theatricals, and wanted Jacqueline to take the principal part in the play, saying that she ought to put her lessons in elocution to some use.  The piece chosen was to illustrate a proverb, and was entirely new.  It was as unexceptionable as it was amusing; the most severe critic could have found no fault with its morality or with its moral, which turned on the eagerness displayed by young girls nowadays to obtain diplomas.  Scylla and Charybdis was its name.  Its story was that of a young bride, who, thinking to please a husband, a stupid and ignorant man, was trying to obtain in secret a high place in the examination at the Sorbonne—­’un brevet superieur’.  The husband, disquieted by the mystery, is at first suspicious, then jealous, and then is overwhelmed with humiliation when he discovers that his wife knows more of everything than himself.  He ends by imploring her to give up her higher education if she wishes to please him.  The little play had all the modern loveliness and grace which Octave Feuillet alone can give, and it contained a lesson from which any one might profit; which was by no means always the case with Madame d’Avrigny’s plays, which too often were full of risky allusions, of critical situations, and the like; likely, in short, to “sail too close to the wind,” as Fred had once described them.  But Madame d’Avrigny’s prime object was the amusement of society, and society finds pleasure in things which, if innocence understood them, would put her to the blush.  This play, however, was an exception.  There had been very little to cut out this time.  Madame de Nailles had been asked to take the mother’s part, but she declined, not caring to act such a character in a house where years before in all her glory she had made a sensation as a young coquette.  So Madame d’Avrigny had to take the part herself, not sorry to be able to superintend everything on the stage, and to prompt Dolly, if necessary—­Dolly, who had but four words to say, which she always forgot, but who looked lovely in a little cap as a femme de chambre.