He was, she said, a profoundly learned man, graduate of one
of those great universities over in his native Germany, and a naturalist.
Young? Well, eh--comparatively--yes. At which the silent husband smiled
his dissent.
The Baron was an entomologist. Both the Fontenettes thought we should be
fascinated with the beauty of some of his cases of moths and butterflies.
"And coleoptera," said the soft rose-wife. She could ask him to bring them
to us. Take us to him?--Oh!--eh--her embarrassment made her prettier, as
she broke it to us gently that the Baroness was a seamstress. She hushed
at her husband's mention of shirts; but recovered when he harked back to
the Baron, and beamed her unspoken apologies for the great, brave scholar
who daily, silently bore up under this awful humiliation.
III
Toward the close of the next afternoon she brought the entomologist. I can
see yet the glad flutter she could not hide as they came up our front
garden walk in an air spiced by the "four-o'clocks," with whose small
trumpets--red, white, and yellow--our children were filling their laps and
stringing them on the seed-stalks of the cocoa-grass. He was bent and
spectacled, of course; _l'entomologie oblige_; but, oh, besides!--
"Comparatively young," Mrs.
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