ABSTRACT
The time is a little before noon, some six or eight weeks from now. To be exact, it is five minutes to twelve on the day when autumn’s first white frost brocades the plane trees. Madame Elegante is just coming out of Isabelle Lancray’s Institut de Beaute in the rue Francois I, where she has been acquiring the new season’s maquillage gouache; and she is crossing the road to Balmain’s for a fitting. Madame’s appearance is mondaine, mature; for the couturiers have consciously added some ten years to her age this season. She is the femme de quarante ans. There is a pervasion of cultivated elegance about her that disdains the youthful chic with which she charmed her escorts only this summer when she was, surely, not a day more than thirty. If we are so fortunate as to catch sight of Madame Elegante later in the day, she will bear a subtly different mien.
