Page 1025 - vanity-fair

ears the next time you see him at the Club,’ she said to her
husband. But Eagles was only a quiet old gentleman, hus-
band to Mrs. Eagles, with a taste for geology, and not tall
enough to reach anybody’s ears.
The Eagles then patronized Mrs. Rawdon, took her to
live with her at her own house at Paris, quarrelled with the
ambassador’s wife because she would not receive her pro-
tegee, and did all that lay in woman’s power to keep Becky
straight in the paths of virtue and good repute.
Becky was very respectable and orderly at first, but the
life of humdrum virtue grew utterly tedious to her before
long. It was the same routine every day, the same dulness
and comfort, the same drive over the same stupid Bois
de Boulogne, the same company of an evening, the same
Blair’s Sermon of a Sunday night—the same opera always
being acted over and over again; Becky was dying of wea-
riness, when, luckily for her, young Mr. Eagles came from
Cambridge, and his mother, seeing the impression which
her little friend made upon him, straightway gave Becky
warning.
Then she tried keeping house with a female friend; then
the double menage began to quarrel and get into debt. Then
she determined upon a boarding-house existence and lived
for some time at that famous mansion kept by Madame de
Saint Amour, in the Rue Royale, at Paris, where she began
exercising her graces and fascinations upon the shabby dan-
dies and fly-blown beauties who frequented her landlady’s
salons. Becky loved society and, indeed, could no more ex-
ist without it than an opium-eater without his dram, and

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