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Maudita had given out too. Of course the doctor came presently and separated the patients, and gave them pills and powders and bromides without end; and there were watchers to keep the delicate creatures, whom it took three or four people to hold in their fits, from injuring themselves; and at last sleep came with the all-persuading chloral, and with the awaking from that powerful chloral-given sleep came an imbecile sort of state, whose scattered wits were full of small cunning and spites, that told secrets and told lies, and could not pronounce names; and lips were blistered and eyes were swollen and purblind; and Florimonde and Maudita must keep Lent in spite of themselves.
Skirt over skirt of fluffy net flowed round Maudita, and let their misty clouds blow about the trailing ornaments of long green grasses and blue corn-flowers that she wore, while puffs and falls half veiled the stomacher of Mexican turquoise and diamond sparks, whose device imitated a spray of the same flowers; and in among the masses of her glittering, waving auburn hair rested a slender diadem of the turquoise again that whose nameless tint, half blue, half green, makes it an inestimable treasure among the Navajoes, as it was once among the Aztecs, who called it the chalchivitl; each cluster of Maudita's turquoises set in a frost-work of finest diamonds a splendid toilette indeed, as fresh and radiant as the morning dew upon the meadows.
But how long do you suppose they will keep it? and in what way? As the good formalist fasts on Friday, with dishes of oysters escalloped deliciously on the shell, with toasted crabs, and bass baked in port wine. Will Florimonde forego her low necks or Maudita her blonde powder? Will there be any less excitement or rivalry in their private theatricals and concerts for charity?
Maudita went out with Florimonde, too, that night, as she had gone every night for two months before.
Florimonde had given out. As I sprang to investigate this surprising condition of things, there came a sudden gurgle and a groan from Maudita, who had risen in her own little bed at my motion.
Well for Florimonde and Maudita, with all the dew and freshness of their youth destroyed, if at length, thoroughly ennuyées, they do not put a piquancy and flavor of sin into their pleasure, as the old West Indian toper dashes his insipid brandy with cayenne!"
I turned to see her clutching her throat, as if her hands were the claws of a wild-cat: she was laughing and howling and crying all at once; her face was of a dark purple tint; her body that lithe and supple waltzing body of hers was bending itself rigidly into the shape of a bow, resting by the head and the heels on the bed the dignified Maudita! and the foam was standing half an inch high on her mouth.
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