Sealed Lips — page 78: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

70 SHALED LIPS, CHAPTER IX. A RE-INTRODUCTION INTO SOCIETY. About this time Godefroid received a note from the Baroness de Pragneres. The three gifts that a woman desires the most in this world are wealth, beauty, and wit, and they were very unevenly dis- tributed with this woman. She had wealth in pro- fusion, wit in a certain degree, and was perfectly ugly. She was at heart an excellent woman, full of good intentions, which she loosened from time to time on people, after the fashion of the fable of the bears and the stones. Having plenty of leisure time, for she had no children, no lovers, and very little of a husband, she was the first to invent that idea of fashionable women which makes such rav- ages now. Sometimes she exhibited in the salona terra-cotta bust of her chambermaid, then a portrait of her dog. She sometimes had a production of her own played at her house by actors from the Francais. Another day she would slip in between one of Saint-Saen’s concertos and a romance of Gounod’s, a serenade of herown. She wrote for the journals on society topics and for reviews on archeological questions. At last her first novel was announced for an early date, | Gomich O)(O ) KS (Cl QO)