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Monsieur Pettigrat was a big, broad, uncommon man; he knew that he was uncommon, and dressed accordingly in a cloak and a brigand's hat; he saw what others did not, and spoke in a manner suitably impressive. "I will tell you, madame, about your daughter," he said somberly. "To me she has a fated look." Mrs. Thesiger was a little consoled to think that she had a daughter with a fated look.
Cold-cream! and be sure you put it on your face before you go to bed." Sylvia apparently did not hear her mother's comment. At all events she disregarded it, and Monsieur Pettigrat once again shook his head at Sylvia with a kindly magnificence. "They have no message for me, mademoiselle," he said, with a sigh, as though he for once regretted that he was so uncommon. "I once went up there to see."
"I wonder if others have noticed it," she said, cheerfully. "No," replied Monsieur Pettigrat. "No others. Only I." "There! That's just like Sylvia," cried Mrs. Thesiger, in exasperation. "She has a fated look and makes nothing of it." But the secret of her discontent was just a woman's jealousy of a younger rival. Men were beginning to turn from her toward her daughter.
Sylvia reached the hotel in time for dinner, and as she sat with her mother, drinking her coffee in the garden afterward, Monsieur Pettigrat planted himself before the little iron table. He shook his head, which was what his friends called "leonine." "Mademoiselle," he said, in his most impressive voice, "I envy you." Sylvia looked up at him with a little smile of mischief upon her lips.
At such times there would come an uncomfortable sensation that she was being weighed and found wanting; or a question would leap in her mind and bring with it fear, and the same question which she had asked herself in the train on the way to Chamonix. "You ask me about my daughter?" she once exclaimed pettishly to Monsieur Pettigrat.
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