CHAPTER XXIOne morning, while Dora was deep in consultation with an artist who was persuading her to let him plaster the dining-room walls with vari-coloured paints, and smear it into a semblance of old Italian distempering of soft grays faintly streaked with orange and pale blue, and when Mrs. Spaulding was attending a board meeting of the Wayside Shelter, Hilary walked up to the apartment, to see if the barrels of china from Quimper had arrived.
They had not. She comforted Germaine and Antoine with a few moments’ chatter in their own tongue. Her mother had been a Lyonaise, certainly. Her grandfather had been Reni Charpentier, of St. Cyr.
Germaine and Antoine, stout, middle-aged women with hard red cheeks, were ecstatic. Quelle miracle—that Mademoiselle should know Lyon and St. Cyr! And
