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A newsboy met Bobby on the train with the morning papers from home, and in them he read delightfully flavored and spiced accounts of the great Villenauve breach-of-promise case, embellished with many details that were entirely new to him. He had not counted on this phase of the matter, and it struck him almost as with an ague.
He rather counted himself a prig that he could not sooner get over this habit of embarrassment, and every time Madam Villenauve insisted on calling him into her dressing-room when she was in much more of dishabille than he would have thought permissible in ordinary people, he felt that same painful lack of sophistication.
These were the ones who had made sure of his entire solvency, and these afterward swayed the balance of the company to a stand which won a better compromise. When Monsieur Noire, with a curious smile, asked Madam Villenauve, however, she laughed very pleasantly. "Oh, non," said she; "it does not apply, zis offair, to me. I do not need it, for Monsieur Burnit ees to marry wiz me zis Christmastam."
He found the room in a litter, with garments of all sorts cast about in reckless disorder. "I have been seeing you last night," began Madam Villenauve, shaking her finger at him archly as she swept some skirts off a chair for him to sit down, and then took her place before her dressing-table, where she added the last deft touch to her coiffure.
Whereupon Bobby, with his customary courtesy, replied: "No gentleman would care to deny such a charming and attractive possibility, Madam Villenauve." But the gracious speech was of the lips alone, and spoken with a warning glare against "kidding" at the grinning Biff Bates, who had found business of urgent importance for that night in the city where the company was booked.
A knock followed and Madam Villenauve went to the door. "Who ees it?" she asked with her hand on the knob. "It is I; Monsieur Noire," was the reply. "Oh, la, come in, zen," she invited, and threw open the door. Monsieur Noire entered, but, finding Bobby in the chair by the dresser, stopped uncertainly in the doorway. "Oh, come on een," she gaily invited; "we are all ze good friends; oui?"
At the supper that night, Madam Villenauve, with a great show of playful indignation, routed Madam Kadanoff from her accidental seat next to Bobby, and, in giving up the seat, which she did quite gracefully enough, Madam Kadanoff dropped some remark in choice Russian, which, of course, Bobby did not understand, but which Madam Villenauve did, for she laughed a little shrilly and, with an engaging upward smile at Bobby, observed: "I theenk I shall say it zat zees so chairming Monsieur Burnit is soon to marry wiz me; ees eet not, monsieur?"
The one most at war with her own world was Madam Villenauve, whose especial bête noire was the MeeGeenees, whom, by no possibility, could she ever under any circumstance be induced to call Caravaggio.
"I wish to speak wiz you on some beezness, Meester Burnit," she told him abruptly, and with an imperatively beckoning hand stepped back with a bow for him to enter. With just a moment of surprised hesitation he stepped into the room, whereupon the Villenauve promptly closed the door.
In the morning it seemed that Madam Villenauve had been in earnest in her absurd intentions, for, in his room, at eleven o'clock, he was served with papers in the breach-of-promise suit of Villenauve versus Burnit, and the amount of damages claimed was the tremendous sum of one hundred and fifty thousand dollars, an amount, of course, only commensurate with Madam Villenauve's standing in the profession and her earning capacity as an artist, her pride and shattered feelings and the dashing to earth of her love's young dream being of corresponding value.
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