President du Eonceret was a tall, spare man with a receding
forehead and scanty, auburn hair. He was wall-eyed, his
complexion was blotched, his lips thin and hard, his scarcely
audible voice came out like the husky wheezings of asthma.
He had for a wife a great, solemn, clumsy creature, tricked
out in the most ridiculous fashion, and outrageously over-
dressed. Mme. la Presidente gave herself the airs of a queen ;
she wore vivid colors, and always appeared at balls adorned
with the turban, dear to the British female, and lovingly
cultivated in out-of-the-way districts in France. Each of the
pair had an income of four or five thousand francs, which,
with the President's salary, reached a total of some twelve
thousand. In spite of a decided tendency to parsimony,
vanity required that they should receive one evening in the
week. Du Croisier might import modern luxury into the
town, M. and Mme. du Eonceret were faithful to the old tradi-
tions. They had always lived in the old-fashioned house be-
longing to Mme. du Eonceret, and had made no changes in it
since their marriage. The house stood between a garden and
a courtyard. The gray old gable end, with one window in
each story, gave upon the road. High walls enclosed the



THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN 261

garden and the yard, but the space taken up beneath them in
the garden by a walk shaded with chestnut trees was filled in
the yard by a row of outbuildings. An old rust-devoured
iron gate in the garden wall balanced the yard gateway, a
huge, double-leaved carriage entrance with a buttress on either
side, and a mighty shell on the top. The same shell was
repeated over the house-door.
