human
You are Miss Margaret Walsingham, a celebrity, even in America, quoth madame, blandly.
gpt
Your colonel was much talked of here for his bravery. I am quite delighted to meet the woman who has fought so spiritedly for the colonel's rights.
human
Your praise is very disinterested, Madame Hesslein, returned she, simply.
gpt
I thank you for it. I am very strange here, and can't tell what the people say about my affairs. I had hoped that they knew nothing about me.
human
Pshaw! my good lady, you can't expect to pass through life with your history and not excite remark, retorted Madame Hesslein, with a flirt of the jeweled fan.
gpt
No heroine does, be she a good or a bad one. Men must talk--give them something to talk about.
human
You are reading me, laughed madame, clanking her golden bracelet on her dainty wrist.
gpt
You are wondering what a woman of the world like me wants with a saint like yourself, are you not?
human
I am thinking that no doubt you have a purpose in view,
gpt
Quite wrong, Miss Walsingham, she cried.
human
I have no purpose as yet, save the pleasant one of studying a nature which I cannot imitate. I have been celebrated in my day, but not as you; women are your worshippers; women cry, 'Noble, generous creature!' Women only envied me, and presumed to criticise; 'twas men who gave me homage.
gpt
Don't jest, madame, upon my history; it may yet end in a tragedy!
human
Ah, ah! breathed madame, warningly,
gpt
Your husband is dead?
human
Yes, and no. Dead to me these five years, though. Fact is, Miss Walsingham--don't feel horror-stricken--that Joliffe was intolerably prosy; we had a quarrel, and I ran off. Why not? Since then we have got comfortably divorced, and I can marry as soon as I like again. Joliffe was so jealous. I must not drive to the general's, I must not walk with a senator, I must eschew the military, and the best wits of the day are military men. Horrors! I must devote myself to Joliffe, and he only on the embassy at Washington.
gpt
General Legrange here declares that you are the widow of a Plenipotentiary of the French Court!
human
Does he indeed? cried madame, with the gusto of habitual vanity.
gpt
Then I sha'n't contradict him--don't you, Miss Walsingham. They must always talk about me wherever I go. I am accustomed to it; I let them say what they choose. I please myself, and the world gives me my way, I've been North and South, East and West, and although I have seen trouble, I have ever trodden over it; no woman has ever got into the wrong box so often and come out of it to a higher grade; no woman has ever borne so much scandal, and been popular in spite of it. I survive it all; I eat, drink, make merry--am feasted, courted, and adored, and all because I don't let affairs of the heart vex me. I don't mope, and muse, and turn melancholy as you (a good creature, too), are doing.