He drew a long breath, and cast his dead cigar from him with a vivid gesture of disgust.
"The upshot was, that Garnier got busy the right way. He furnished the political pull, and I furnished the money. We stopped fooling with the police and went straight to the Préfet, and they passed the order down quick from one office to another, to have that inquest settled at once, with no more noise. When that hit the police who'd been bothering us, they curled up and dropped off. I bribed a reporter and the editor of the local newspaper, and when the music-teacher brought Marise back to the funeral, the whole mess was buried."
In the momentary silence which followed, as he drew breath again, Cousin Hetty's self-control gave way. He could feel that she was shaking uncontrollably and hear that her teeth were chattering.
He was startled, having forgotten that she was there, forgotten that this was anything but one of the sick, silent evocations which blackened so many hours for him.
"Great Scott! Hetty, you're freezing to death," he cried, helping her roughly to her feet. "Why under the sun didn't yousayyou were getting cold?"
She did not intimate that she was shaken by anything but a physical chill. Stiff and bent, clinging to his great arm, unable to stop the nervous chattering of her teeth, she hobbled back to the house beside him.
The light from the fire on the hearth set them miles apart, as she had known it would. His face closed shut. He would never mention all this to her again. He was irritated thathe had spoken. He blamed her because he had spoken. But she cared less than nothing whether she were blamed or not. As soon as she was able to control the nervous trembling of her hands and lips and head, she asked, "How much does Marise know?"
He said impatiently, "I don't know. I haven't any idea. I thought perhapsyoumight have. Whyelsedo you suppose I told you about it?"
"What do you think?" she persisted.
"Well, I don't see how she could. That music-teacher had gone directly to be with her, and stayed with her practically every minute I wasn't, and I know she'd never tell her anything, nor let anybody else. But you never know. You never know. There are a million underground ways—in France especially. You find out everything you ever know through the back of your head somehow, or by putting two and two together that nobody meant you to. Servants—gossip—though, thank God, Jeanne had a stroke of paralysis just then, that kept her from saying a word till after we had left Bayonne. If Jeanne had been able to talk, I'd have beensurethat Marise had heard forty times more than there was to know. Damn Jeanne! and yet she'd have died to get Marise a new dress or something good to eat, any day! I don't see how Marisecouldhave heard anything. And of course, if she didn't—least said, soonest mended. But if she did, it's a dead sure thing she got it all twisted, and I suppose she ought to have it straightened out."
His old cousin broke in with a rush, "Well, I think you'd better tell her," and felt instantly that this was not at all the answer he had wished for. "You don't want to do it," she said.
"Oh, I never want to do anything," he admitted. "It's always the easiest way."
"The easiest way lands you in some pretty hard places," she observed.
He made no comment on this, but his silence did not save him from her further going on, "Look where it landed you with Flora."
He was stirred to a moment of heat, "What are you talking about, Hetty? By God, I never refused Flora anything she wanted. If you callthatthe easiest way!"
She flared up in a momentary impatience at his denseness, but wasted no words on an issue no longer vital.
"Well, I think you'd better tell Marise," she repeated stubbornly.
He set this on one side for a moment as irrelevant, and said, "All I want to know from you is whether you've ever seen a sign in her to make you think she had heard anything. Did you ever notice when she speaks of her mother ... or whether she doesn't speak?"
She scorned, as he knew she would, coloring the truth to win a point, "No, I never did," she stated honestly.
"Well then, that's all I wanted to know. I know you'd have seen it, if it were there, she's been so much with you."
"But I think you ought to tell her," she persisted.
"Why, under the Heavens,why?" he asked. "Why put ideas in her head, if she's perfectly all right?"
"I think everybody ought to know about everything," she answered sweepingly, "and they're not perfectly all right unless they do. At least, if shehasheard anything, she ought to know that you don't blame Flora, that you don't think there was anything but talk. You could talk it over with her, get it out into the light."
"It would be poisoning her mind against her mother to mention it."
"I don't believe," Cousin Hetty held to her point steadily, pale, very much in earnest, "I don't believe that the truth can poison anybody's mind."
"Well, I believe in using ordinary horse-sense about everything," he said conclusively, with a peremptory accent.
Cousin Hetty fell back from this brute assertion of his authority.
"You'd made up your mind what to do before you ever spoke to me," she told him, not without bitterness.
"That isn't fair, I didn't know enough to make up my mind. You told me what I needed to know," he answered.
"I wish Icouldtell you what you need to know," she flamed out at him.
But she evidently found it useless to try any longer, and sank again huddled in her low chair. He got up carelessly and shook himself to start the blood through his great frame, numbed by immobility. His eye was caught by the expression of the old woman's face as she looked up at him. He stood still, considering her, "You're going to miss Marise," he said.
She turned back hastily towards the fire, to hide the sudden trembling of her lips, and presently said in a dry voice, "All I want is for her to have what is best for her."
He agreed to this with relief, "Sure! So do I. Poor kid.Shenever asked to be born."
Later, as he started up the stairs, his glass kerosene lamp in his hand, he said, "You know, Hetty, as well as I do that it doesn't make any difference what we do, or don't do for her. She's got to take what's coming to her just like everybody else."
His cousin looked down at the steady, commonplace little flame of her own lamp, "I don't suppose I'll ever see her again," she said in a low tone of profound sadness. But she added stoically, as she began to climb the stairs after him, "Not that that makes any difference to anybody but me."
Paris, May, 1905.
"Holá ... p-s-st! Allen!" called Marthe Tollet, as Marise passed through the glass-covered verandah, on her way to the street door. In her haste to stop Marise, she used the abrupt surname hail which the girls thought so very chic and truly English, which the older teachers forbade as rude and barbarous, a typical manifestation of the crumbling down of civilized French ways under the onslaught of modern Anglo-Saxon roughness.
"Eh bien, the little Tollet, what is it?" asked Marise in the same vernacular, pausing in front of the concierge's door. Marthe left the Swedish ladder, where she was twisting her flexible young body in and out of the rungs, and coming up to Marise remarked casually, "Oh, I just thought maybe you'd like to go to the dormitory and see that little compatriot of yours. She's crying like everything, la pauvre, and nobody can do a thing with her."
"The pretty little girl with blonde hair?" asked Marise, somewhat vague as to the younger girls in the lower classes. "What's the matter with her?"
"A perfectly horrible attack of homesickness, they say. The English teacher is up there—she's the only one who can talk to her; but you know how likely the MacMurray will be to put balm on a sore heart, eh? And you could make a wooden man split his sides laughing, once you get started.Youcould cheer her up."
Marise hesitated, looked in at the clock in the concierge's loge, and nodded. She started towards the door of the dormitory building, stopped and called back, "O là, the little Tollet, what's her name?
"Eugénie," said the other, "Eugénie Mille."
As she climbed the dark, winding, well-waxed stairs, Marisereflected that that didn't sound like an American name, and made a guess that, as had happened to her before, she would find that the "American girl" was from Martinque, or Peru or Saõ Paulo.
But it was English, sure enough, that Miss MacMurray was talking, as she bent over the sobbing blue-serge heap, on the narrow iron bed. She was saying helplessly, "There now, it's verra har-rd, I know, I'm far from home, mysel'," patting the heaving shoulders with one hand, and anxiously looking at her watch. She was due at a private lesson in ten minutes, and a private lesson meant five irreplaceable francs.
She welcomed the tall American girl with relief, "Ah, that's right, that's right, you'll know how to get her quieted down," and fled before Marise could protest that she did not even know the homesick child.
Rather at a loss, and very unenthusiastically, Marise stood looking down on the crumpled, untidy bed, and the mass of disordered golden hair, noting the fineness of the tailored blue serge, and the excellently made small shoes. They were unmistakably North American in their shapeliness. Nothing Peruvian or Brazilian about them!
What could you do for somebody who was homesick? She certainly did not know from experience. Nobody had ever done anything for her. She sat down on the edge of the bed, laid her arm over the narrow shoulders, and said cheerfully, "Hallo there, what's the matter? You'll run out of tears, if you aren't careful!"
At the sound of her voice the sobbing stopped abruptly. The girl on the bed started, dashed the floating brilliant hair from her face, and turned on Marise, blue eyes dimmed with tears. She looked exhausted by her passion of sobbing.
"Why, you poor kid!" said Marise compassionately. She hadn't thought it was as serious as allthat!
The other with a rough, scrambling sprawl, got herself to her knees and sat up, rubbing the tears away from her eyes with the backs of her hands, and drawing long, quivering breaths. Her lips were swollen, her cheeks fiery and glazed.
Marise was touched, and putting out her arms drew theother into them. "Here, you must let me help you get used to things.I'vebeen homesick, too."
The girl tried to speak, was on the point of bursting into tears again, struggled wildly to get the better of her excitement and emotion, and finally brought out in a strangled voice, "I'm nothomesick! Ihatemy home! I wouldn't go back theah foranything!"
The words in themselves were sufficiently astonishing to Marise, and the raging accent with which they were cast out made them even more disconcerting. She felt that the little quivering body in her arms was clinging desperately to her, and sat silent, holding the unhappy child close, because she did not know what else to do with her.
Presently, however, she ventured to ask, "Where is your home?"
"Itwasin Arkansas," said the other, in a muffled, defiant tone. "It isn't anywheah now. It's heah."
Marise not being very intimately acquainted with the shades and phases of certain American prejudices, saw nothing peculiar in having one's home in Arkansas. Why not?
Apparently some hint of this reached the other, for after a moment of silent, expectant tension, she lifted her face from Marise's shoulder and looked up searchingly into her face. How pretty she must be, thought Marise, when she hadn't been crying. She must look like a pink lily in the midst of the dark-skinned, dark-haired, city-sallow little girls of her class.
"Have you any of your family here in Paris with you?" she asked now.
"I haven't any family left, only some lawyers and guardians and things," said the other. She spoke as though she were glad of it, Marise thought, so that she suppressed the "oh!" of sympathy which she was on the point of uttering. What a strange little thing!
The strange little thing now looked up at her. "Do you know what I was crying for just now?" she said. Marise could not understand why she asked this in an accusing tone of blame.
"No!" said Marise, as utterly at a loss as ever in her life. "How could I?"
"Because I hate myself so, because I hate my looks and my clothes andeverything!" the other burst out passionately, "I feel like po' white trash. They had plenty of money! Why didn't they send me here befoah?"
"Before!" cried Marise. "Why, you're only a child now."
"I'm almost as old as you are," said the other. "I'm seventeen and you're eighteen."
She flung it out like a grievance.
"Ehbien!" cried Marise in great astonishment. She had not thought the other girl over fourteen.
She said now, sitting up straight and looking wistfully at Marise, "Willyou be friends? You came of your own accord to be nice to me. Tell me about things.Everything!I want so like sin to know! I'll do anything to learn."
"Know what?" asked Marise, bewildered, looking about her, as if she might catch a glimpse of the things the other wanted to know.
"What they all know oveh heah ... everythingyouknow."
Marise drew back with an abrupt gesture, "No,indeed!" she cried, her face darkening, the words leaping out before she could stop them.
"Oh, I don't mean your secrets. I don't care about that. And I don't mean the way you play the piano, although I know some of the girls are envious of that. And I'd despise to have to study as hard as you-all in the upper classes do. I mean the right way to sit down and hold your hands and speak and weah clothes."
Marise began to laugh, "Idon't know how to wear clothes. What do you want anyhow? You're prettier than any girl in the school, and you are wearing a dress that cost more than anybody's else, and finer shoes than you could buy in all Paris."
"But they're not right," the girl said petulantly, "or else I don'tweahthem right, or something! I hate them! I have lots of money, but I don't know how to buy what I want."She flung herself again on Marise, holding her closely, "Help me!" she begged, "help me buy what I want."
Marise was touched by the loneliness which underlay the other girl's appeal. She knew what it was to be lonely! It was the first time that any one had broken through into her loneliness as this quivering, passionate, unhappy little thing had done; the first time anybody had asked her for help. From the very first word of their talk, the light chaffing manner which was her usual shield had been torn into shreds by the other girl's driving directness. She looked deep into the other's eyes, fixed breathlessly on her, and said seriously, "Yes, Eugénie, I'll help you ... all I can."
"There!" said the other, "that's a specimen. My name's not Eugénie. It's Eugenia. Isn't that turrible?"
Marise did not follow this at all. "It's just the same thing, only in English, isn't it?"
"Yes, but it's horrid and common in English, and it's lovely in French. Why can't Ihaveit Eugénie?" She looked up keenly and searchingly into Marise's face, and at what she caught there, she contradicted herself hastily, before Marise could open her lips.
"No, no, I see. It would be silly to change it—to pretend. I'd better make the best of it. There! There's one fool mistake you kept me from making, you see!"
Marise felt that the talk was on a plane different from hers, so that she did not get its meaning, although the words were clear enough. What was all that about Eugenia and Eugénie? She hadn't caught the point of that, at all.
Being only eighteen, she found her bewilderment rather comic, and began to laugh. "I still don't see that Eugenia isn't just as good as Eugénie!" she said, "I honestly don't know what you're talking about, Eugenia, but ifyoudo, it's all right."
"Oh,Ido," said the other with conviction.
Marise was relieved to see that her small, pretty face, although still flushed from her fit of tears no longer looked distraught.
"How strange!" thought Marise. They had never spokena word to each other ten minutes before, and now they were sitting side by side, hand in hand, like sisters.
"I'm awfully glad I came in," she said.
"So am I," said Eugenia, "I'd been just crazy to talk to you, but you're so many classes higher than me. Oh, how Ihatemy class—to be put back with all those young ones! And study suchturriblystupid things! And the teacher! Such an old frump. And I'm not havinganything of what I want. I'm not getting on a bit. What do I care what France did in India before the English got there? I didn't come to France to learn those sort of things! Marise—please can I call you Marise? Do you suppose I'llever, everspeak French as you do?"
"Why, of course," Marise answered her reasonably, "everybody does, who lives here. Why shouldn't you?" The echo of the famished, burning accent of the other struck now oddly on her ear. She repeated, "Of course you will, if you care to," and went on, "but why should you bother to care so much? What difference does it make? They don't bother themselves to learn English."
Eugenia flashed a look of quick astonishment at her. Apparently this was an entirely new idea to her. After an instant's silent consideration of it, she flung it away with the aggrieved cry, "Oh, but youdo! Youdo!" as though, thought Marise, that incapacitated her from having a valid opinion about it. But this too, like the Eugénie-Eugenia discussion had somehow taken place in another dimension than the one she knew. She was not allowed to ponder the question, however, receiving at this point another impassioned embrace from Eugenia, who cried, "You don'tknowhow glad I am you came! Now it'll be all right. And I've been so miserable. Let's talk! Let's talk!"
"I must soon be going to a music-lesson," said Marise, glancing at the little jewel-crusted watch, which hung on a black ribbon around the other girl's neck.
Eugenia caught at her despairingly. "Oh, don't go away. I haven'tbegunyet! I haven't said aword!" Then struck by another possibility, "Can't I go with you? We could talk inthe cab, and I wouldn't say a word at your lesson. Yes,dolet me."
"I wasn't going to take a cab," protested Marise, "I don't go round in cabs except when I'm dressed up in the evenings. It would be pretty expensive, ma foi! to take a cab everywhere I went in the daytime. Mostly I walk."
"Oh, I hate to walk, letmetake the cab," the other girl begged, beginning hastily to arrange her hair. "I've got plenty of money. It's the only thing I have got." She paused, the brush in her hand. "Haven't you?" she asked, addressing herself to Marise's reflection in the glass.
Marise was passably astonished at the unceremonious question, but answered it simply, "I haven't any of my own. I live with my father. And he hasn't any either, but he makes a good deal, gets a good salary, I mean. He lets me have all I need."
Eugenia's comment on this was to say bitterly, "Think of not knowing more than to ask such a question! I told you I don't know anything. But I can learn. I can learn in a minute if only I get the chance. I learned then ... from the way you looked. I'll never makethatfool mistake again."
She pinned on a very pretty, costly hat, and Marise saw that she really did not look like a child, after all. She ran her arm under Marise's now, and gave it an ecstatic squeeze. "Oh, I'm so happy!" she cried, "I wish I could buy you a diamond necklace!"
The talk in the cab as they clattered over the big paving-stones of the quiet, half-deserted left-bank streets turned on the school, and very soon Marise was led to say, "But, see here, I don't believe, Eugenia, you've got into the right school atall. It's not a bit chic, you know, to go to a girl's lycée, and ours is one of the plainest of them all. The teachers are terrible grinds, the girls are fearfully serious-minded. They don't care a thing about their looks. All they want is to pass the competitive exams for the Ecole Normale at Sèvres, and get in there for four more years of grind, lots and lots worse than at the lycée. You'd better believe there's nothingbutwhat France did in India before the English got there, et ainsi de suite."
Eugenia made a gesture of despair. "There!" she lamented, "that's it! Not even to know enough to pick out the right school!"
And then a curious expression of suspicion coming into her eyes, she said skeptically, "butyougo to that school! If it's good enough for you...!"
Here again was something in that baffling other dimension, and this time though she understood it as little as ever, Marise did not like it at all. She said stiffly, "I'm going because you can get serious instruction in some things I need to enter the classes at the Sorbonne next year."
Eugenia sprang at her, remorsefully crying, "I won't again. I don't know what made me." She kissed her once more, rubbing her cheek against the other's shoulder.
Her bewildering alternations of mood, the reckless way in which she threw herself on Marise to embrace her; and the way, very startling to a girl brought up in France, in which Eugenia kissed her on the mouth like a lover, were very exciting to Marise. Not since Jeanne's big double kisses had she been so fondled and caressed, and never had she been kissed on the lips before. That was something closely associated in her mind with secrecy and passion. It made her feel very queer; partly stand-offish and startled, partly moved and responsive—altogether shaken up, more alive, but apprehensively uncertain of what was coming next.
"And whatisthe Sorbonne?"
"It's the University," Marise explained, "I was half-way through a woman's college in America, when we came abroad again. So I wanted to go on and study some more here although I have to work so many hours a day on my music that I can't ever hope to have a degree."
"College? University?" Eugenia was horrified. "Mercy! What makes you want to do that? And music lessons, too. I should think you'd be working every minute."
"I do," said Marise.
"Just study, study, study, and practise, practise, practise?" asked the other, astonished.
"Mostly," said Marise.
"Why, that'sturrible!" cried Eugenia, beginning to look alarmed.
"That's the way everybody does over here," said Marise.
"Theydo!" cried Eugenia, aghast and astounded. "Why, I thought they...."
Marise corrected herself, "Oh, of course not. What am I talking about? I mean the kind of folks I know. There are millions of others, I suppose, yes, of course, all the rue de la Paix clientèle, who don't work at all."
Eugenia was relieved at this, and relapsed for a moment into silence, which she finally broke by asking, "Well, wheahwouldyou go to school, if you were me?"
Marise had been thinking of this, and was ready, "There's a very grand private school, I've heard about out at Auteuil, in what was somebody's country estate, when Auteuil was the country, with a château and a park. It's fearfully expensive and so it must be very chic. The girls never go out by themselves, always have a maid, or a teacher with them; the old ideas, aristocratic, you know, that ordinary French people don't hold to any more. Mrs. Marbury could tell you all about it."
"Who?... Mrs. Mahbury?"
"Oh, she's an American, who's always lived over here, in the American colony. Her husband and my father are in the same sort of business. We know her. She'd besureto know what was chic."
"Well, I'll go to that school," announced Eugenia. "I justknewthere'd be a place like that, if I could only find out wheah. I bet you I won't have to study French historytheah."
Marise laughed, "You'll probably have to work like a dog, for the teacher who teachesla tenue."
"What's that?"
"Oh, all I know about it is what the dancing teacher used to make us do in the convent-school I went to in Bayonne;walk into a room, pretend to greet somebody, step into a make-believe carriage and out of it, sit down with him for a talk; and first he'd pretend to be a girl like you, and then he'd pretend to be an older woman, and then he'd pretend to be a man (only of course he really was that), and you'd have to have the right manner for each one.... All that kind of foolishness, you know."
"No, I don't know!" cried Eugenia angrily.
The cab drew up and stopped. "I suppose we're theah," said Eugenia, "you tell him to wait till we come out."
She was cautiously silent during the introduction to Mme. de la Cueva, and during the hour of the lesson. But if she gave her tongue little employment, she kept her eyes busy, absorbing every detail of the long, bare room, with its four long windows opening on a balcony overlooking the little, dank, unkempt Jardin de Cluny. After the lesson, Mme. de la Cueva stepped into another room to get some music, and Marise, rather pale with fatigue, walked wearily out on the balcony for a breath of fresh air. Eugenia sprang to follow her, as if she had been wishing to do this, and had not known if it were allowable. But before she looked down on the medieval building below them she said in a whisper to Marise, "You're dog-tired. Why, I wouldn't work that hard foranybody! And for that fat old dowd!"
Marise looked down at her astonished. "I'm not working forher!" she exclaimed. But this was, evidently, from the look of Eugenia's face a fourth dimensional remark for her, for she made no answer, turning instead to look at the gray-black old mass of Cluny.
"What is it?" Eugenia asked.
Marise had not yet wholly emerged from a struggle with an exercise which she had not been able to execute with the inhuman, neat-fingered velocity demanded by Mme. de la Cueva. The hour in that other world to which music always transported her had broken the continuity of her impressions of her new friend. She stared rather blankly at Eugenia's question, and looked from her to the well-known medieval pile below them. It did not for the instant occur to her, that the othergirl did not recognize what the building was. The turn of her phrase suggested an inquiry about the architecture, and though she had never thought about Cluny before, the look of it stirred recollections of a certain fierce history teacher, whose specialty had been the transitions of the reign of Louis XII. She looked down on the stone lacework opposite, and said doubtfully, "What is it? Domestic Gothic, shouldn't you think? But some of it pretty late. Those square dormer-windows are Louis Douze, aren't they?"
She looked away from the Cluny and down at Eugenia as she finished, and had once more a shock of astonishment. The other's eyes were flaming. "Theah, that's it," she said fiercely, showing her white teeth as she spoke, but not in a smile. "That's it. That'sjustit!Wheah did you learn that?"
She dashed the question in Marise's face as though it had been her fist.
Marise positively drew back from her. Too startled to be anything but literal, she answered, "Why, why, I don't know where I did. Oh, yes, in my French history class, I suppose. They make you learn everything so hard, you know. You yourself were saying what a grind it is."
Eugenia breathed hard and said, "History again, darn it! But I didn't dream you'd learnthatsort of thing in it." She added defiantly, and for Marise quite cryptically, "Well,I'mgoing to learn it without!"
Mme. de la Cueva came back with the music in her hand. "Voilà, mon enfant," she said, shaking Marise's hand heartily. She reached for Eugenia's hand too, which was hanging at her side, till Eugenia, seeing the meaning of the other's gesture, brought it up with an awkward haste, a painful red burning in her cheeks.
Some one came in as they went out, another student evidently, for he had a roll of music in his hand. He stopped and stood aside with a deep bow to let the two girls pass.
"Good-day, Mlle. Allen," he said, looking at her intently.
"Good-day, M. Boudoin," she answered. Neither girl spoke as they went down the endless, winding stairs and passed out to the street.
As they turned into the Boulevard, and jogged past the Jardin de Cluny, Eugenia asked tensely, "What are those queer-looking broken-down walls?"
Marise answered circumspectly, fearing another out-burst, "I think they're Roman ruins ... what's left of the baths the Romans had here."
Eugenia made no answer, but looked at them hard.
Marise went on, "Awfully interesting, isn't it, to see Roman ruins right in Paris, across the street from a café. But I suppose they'd look like small potatoes to anybody who's seen Rome. Mme. Vallery says they look comically small, after Rome."
Eugenia put her arm around her neck, and kissed her once more, fervently, disturbingly, on the lips, "Would you like to go to Rome? I'lltakeyou to Rome. I'll hire a private car for the two of us."
And before Marise could answer, before she could even bring out the laugh which rose to her lips, Eugenia said with another of her abrupt leaps, "That young man is in love with you. The one who came in afterwards. He's awfully good-looking, too." She looked into Marise's face with her avid, penetrating gaze, and said, "But you don't like him!"
"I never thought about him in my life," cried Marise, exasperated. She was beginning to feel desperately tired of the mental gymnastics of such talk.
"But there was something you didn't like as I spoke about him. Don't youlikemen? Don't you like men to be in love with you? I do, I love it." She made another flying leap, and asked, "Are many French women like your music-teacher—so fat—no style?"
"She's not French, Madame de la Cueva."
"What, then?"
"A Levantine."
"A what? What's a Levantine?"
Marise considered, "Whatisa Levantine, anyhow? A little of everything, I should say, and all more or less oriental and southern. She's part Spanish, part Jewish from Asia Minor, brought up in Cairo and Paris."
Eugenia sheered off on another tack, "And who is Madame Va... Va... something?"
"Madame Vallery? She's a ... she's a sort of friend of mine. Yes, she's a friend. My old music-teacher, when I was a little girl, got us together. She's the wife of a Deputy, you know, like our Congressmen."
"Is she chic, too," asked Eugenia, "like Mrs. Marbury? Is she young? Is she pretty?"
Marise laughed, "No, she's not pretty or young. She must be fifty years old."
Eugenia was shocked. "And a friend ofyouah's!"
Marise explained, "She has more brains than you and I and forty other girls rolled into one. And I've met more interesting people at her house than...."
"Will you take me sometime—will you take me?" asked Eugenia.
"Yes, if you like," said Marise.
Eugenia looked around her wildly, as if to find some way of saying her thanks. Something in the street caught her eye. They were passing a florist's shop. She slammed the door open, curved her flexible little body around the frame, and caught at the driver's coat-tails. "Stop a minute!" she cried to him and dashed into the shop. When she came out she had a huge bunch of mauve-colored orchids in her arms.
"For you, for you," she cried, elated at her idea, thrusting them into Marise's hands, and kissing her again. And then, suddenly downcast, "Oh, it oughtn't to have been orchids! What? Roses? Lilies? Violets?... Yes, violets."
This time Marise protested energetically against this assumption of meanings in her face.
"I don't know what makes yousaysuch things," she cried out helplessly, half-angrily. "Orchids are lovely—beautiful. How could anything be better? I never had any before in my life."
But the other was not to be comforted. "Yes, it ought to have been violets," she murmured, and then squaring her jaw, "And itwillbe violets, the next time. You just see!"
May, 1906.
As Marise started up the front stairway she saw Biron emerging on the run from the foot of the servants' stairway, his apron half-off, a net marketing-bag in his hand. His broad, red face looked cross and anxious. Something must have gone wrong. She turned back, meeting him in front of the concierge's door.
"Oh, Mademoiselle, God be praised you're back in time. Desolation and ruin! The sole has turned—it has been so hot to-day. I swear on my soul as a Christian it was fresh when I got it—unless that blackguard Gagnan changed...."
When Biron turned his torrent of objurgation on the tradespeople who sold him eatables there was no stopping him. Marise cut in now.
"Were you going out for another? Do you want me to go?"
"Yes, yes—only not for a sole—there wouldn't be one left—and the dinner wasplannedfor sole!"
He ground his teeth, white and sound as a wolf's, "I could send Mélanie if she had the intelligence of an angle-worm—and yet to leave her with my sauce till I get back—I was right in the midst of asauce piquantefor the...."
He turned as if to rush back upstairs, distractedly, and turned again as if to rush distractedly out into the street.
Marise put out her hand for the market-bag and spoke with the peremptory decision that was always necessary to unloosen Biron from his temperamental tangles.
"Go right back to your sauce, Biron. I'll have the fish here in five minutes. And have plenty of onion in that sauce. My father thought the last not well-balanced, too much vinegar. He likes his sauces suave."
"But not a sole, Mademoiselle, not a sole! Any sole that is left on the market at six of the evening is left because nobody would buy it. But the dinner wasplannedfor sole!" He stamped his huge, felt-slippered feet in exasperation.
"A mackerel," suggested Marise, "they're good at this time of the year."
He flung his arms over his head. "Amackerel! A gross, fat, dark monster like a mackerel to replace asole!"
"Oh, no, of course not." Marise saw his point. "I didn't think. Nor salmon, of course."
He shuddered away from the idea of salmon.
They stood staring at each other, thinking hard, the cook's big, parboiled fist clenched on his mouth, his brows knit together, like those of thePenseur.
"Some merlans?" suggested Marise. "You can cook themau gratinjustlikea sole."
"But will I have time!" he groaned. "Who knows whether the oven is hot enough?"
"Well, hurry back and brighten the fire, while I rush out and get the fish."
He fled back up the stairs, his slippers flapping. She left her roll of music in the concierge's care and darted out into the street, market-bag in hand. Twenty minutes later the fish were being disposed with a religious care on a bed of chopped parsley, shallots, mushrooms and butter. Biron shoved the baking-pan tenderly into the oven, wiped the sweat from his face, and stopped storming at his wife.
"You were not to blame, after all, Mélanie," he told her magnanimously, and with a long breath, "But it was a close call, by God, a close call."
In the salon Marise was pouring an apéritif for her father, brightly dishing up the news of the day with the sauce of lively comment, and saying nothing about culinary close calls. Her father listened to her, sipping his Dubonnet with an air of intense satisfaction. He took plenty of time for it, allowing each mouthful to deliver all its complicated burden of tang and bitterness and heat before he took another one into his mouth.
"Excellent stuff, Dubonnet," he said appreciatively.
"I'm glad you like it," said Marise. She envied her father his enjoyments. They were, comparatively speaking, so easy to get.
Looking at her seemed to remind him of something. He reached into a vest pocket (with some difficulty, for his vests were more and more tightly packed with each year of good living), and took out a little jeweller's box.
"It's your birthday to-day," he remarked, taking another careful sip of his apéritif.
Marise looked at the present, a little wrist-watch, from a very good house.
"Oh, that's awfully good of you, Father," she said, trying it on.
"You can have one if that funny little friend of yours can," he advanced.
"Oh, if you start giving me everything Eugenia has...!" protested Marise.
"Somebody ought to makehera present of a little ordinary sense," he commented, with no great interest in the subject. "I've seen her kind before. They tear things loose till they get what they want, and then they don't like it."
"Eugenia just loves it, every bit of it," Marise objected.
"Well, let her," he dismissed her from consideration with his usual nonchalance, and taking the last of the Dubonnet, he rose to go into his room.
In a moment Marise heard an indignant roar, "Mélanie has forgotten my hot water again!" Her father came to the door of his room, vast and bulging in his shirt and trousers, outraged by the oversight.
"Oh, yes," said Marise, in annoyance. "You might have known she would. Biron has been in another tantrum and taking her head off. It gets her so rattled she forgets her own work."
"I don't see what that has to do withmy hot water," cried the master of the house aggrieved.
"It hasn't! It hasn't!" cried Marise hastily, running to tell Mélanie of her crime.
Not till the hot water was safely delivered, and her father's comments on bad service diminished to a distant solitary mutter, did Marise go into her own room to dress. She had no hot water, either, but she washed in cold, scorning with all her heart the childishness of men, and laughing childishly at the picture her father had made, shouting and indignant, billowing in his shirt and trousers. He and Biron! One had always to be smoothing them down and wrapping them up in the little things they wanted. It must be truly lovely to be married to one, as poor Mélanie was! But, after all, Father did his best to be good to her, when everything about the house was all right and he could think of it. She hoped the dinner would be all right. It was too bad about that sole. Sole was so expensive too. Not that Father ever objected to anything the table cost. Oh,flûte! she had forgotten to see if Biron had exchanged that Bénédictine for Chartreuse. Father would raise the roof if they served him Bénédictine again. She put on her dress hurriedly, and hooking it up as she went, she stepped hastily down the hall to the kitchen. She never had any help from Mélanie in dressing, not even costumes that hooked up on the shoulders and under the arms, because it was important not to disturb the small quantity of gray matter Mélanie had, at the hour of serving a meal. It was all needed for the matter in hand.
Dinner was over, and had been acceptable. Her father had partaken of everything with his careful appraising attention, and had found no adverse comment to make. Coffee had been served, and the Chartreuse—Biron had not forgotten.
Out in the kitchen Biron (first, taught by much experience, loosening the sash which bound his mighty paunch), was sitting with his wife at table, eating and drinking like a page out of Rabelais. The dinner had pleased his exacting and irritable master (Biron immensely respected him for being exacting and irritable), and it also had pleased Biron. There was plenty of it left and this was a house where the cook was never subjected to the indignity of having inquiries made aboutles restes. He leaned back in his chair, undid the buttonat his throat, and smiled at his wife, over his glass of excellent Burgundy.
"Life is good, hein, old lady?" he said.
She nodded in agreement, keeping her thoughts to herself in the usual stealthy, secretive, feminine fashion.
Over the coffee and Chartreuse, facing another well-satisfied man sat another secretive woman, talking in one key, feeling in another, and finding the process far from enlivening. Down below the surface of the sparkling, chatting Marise, drooped a listless, dispirited Marise for whom a birthday was a most depressing occasion.
"You're nineteen, aren't you, Marise?" asked her father over his cigar.
Marise nodded.
"Well, that's another one gone! Congratulations on every one you get over with," he commented, sipping the stinging green fire of his liqueur with satisfaction.
Marise thought of nothing amusing to say and was silent.
Her father stirred his big body, with the air of some one arousing himself to an effort. The effort seemed to be to say, "Is there anything you want I can get for you?"
His daughter was at a loss before the comprehensiveness of this blanket question. "What kind of a thing?" she inquired.
He professed himself more at a loss than she. "If I had any idea what, I wouldn't need to ask you, would I?"
But he managed, all the same, at least to eliminate some of the things he didn't mean, "Oh, not dresses or hats," and in a moment, after another sip at the liqueur, to give a little more definite idea of what he did, "Something going on, social life; what girls of nineteen are supposed to want."
"Oh, you needn't bother. I get enough of that," she answered, "between Mrs. Marbury and Eugenia and Madame Vallery." She was surprised at her father's interest. They seldom talked together, except of what they were to eat, had eaten, or were eating, or of the interminable games of chess which occupied any leisure moments of his and hers which chanced to coincide. He seemed to have something on hismind now. And he always hated the effort of bringing out what was in his mind. He stopped beating about the bush now and said heavily, "You're no fool, Marise. I don't know any of the roundabout ways to say it to you, that a woman would have, but you won't mind that. What I mean is, I suppose—I imagine that's what's at the bottom of all of it—is this. Are you getting a chance to meet the right sort of young man, the kind you'd want to marry? For you will be marrying before long, I suppose."
Marise waited a long time before she spoke, so that she would not flame out as she felt. That would not be speaking in her father's vernacular, and if there was one thing which every instinct of Marise's taught her, it was to speak to every one in his own language. Nothing in the world would have induced her to expose her own to other people's casual comments, her own, in which she spoke to herself, bitterly, caustically, skeptically, tragically, as no one had ever heard her speak aloud. When she could command herself to select the right phrase out of her father's vocabulary, she remarked, pushing her tiny coffee-cup away with a gesture of finality, "I don't believe I'm very much of a marrying sort."
Her father's comment on this was to say stolidly, "Oh, every girl thinks that." But if he thought he could get a rise out of Marise with this provocation, he was mistaken. She now turned away from the little table and began with an indifferent air to arrange the coal-fire in the grate. They were sitting in the salon.
"Don't you like men?" he asked presently.
She laughed a little, "To dance with."
He looked at her more keenly than he had and asked, "Don't you trust men?"
She turned this off by riposting lightly, "How much is it safe to trust anybody?"
It was as though a chance stroke had cut through the dyke and let out in a rush, waters that had lain sleeping.
"Never trust anybody but yourself," he told her urgently, the words heavy with the intensity of his conviction.
A moment later he added, more deliberately, his manner tinged with his habitual saturnine humor, "And it's not safe to trust yourself very far."
It wasn't at all what he had meant to say to her. But it was such an undertaking to say anything. And what was there to say anyhow? He decided to let it go at that, drank the last of his liqueur, fell back in his armchair and reached for the chess-board.
"I hope you got a good supply of that Chartreuse," he said, beginning to set up the men. "It's very much better than what we've been having. Not so syrupy. I do loathe syrupy things."
After the game was over, he took up his Paris Herald and Marise, freed from the necessity to make talk, went to the piano. She began to play, not Chopin as she would have liked, but a dance from the Arlésienne Suite. Father detested melancholy music.
After she had finished, she sat still, sunk together on the piano stool, staring at the music but not seeing it. She heard her father rustle his newspaper as if he had lowered it to look at her. But for once she made no attempt to arouse herself. She continued to present to him a silent, dejected back.
He must have considered this for some minutes when he finally remarked, "I suppose there are people wholikebirthdays!" Then with a yawn, "But for me, they always make me think of all the ones I have still to get through with, year after year, one by one."
Marise's shoulders bowed under the weight of his words and his accent. She still said nothing.
He took up the newspaper again, but before he began to read he exhorted her, "Oh, well, stick it out! Stick it out, Molly, as best you can. It doesn't last so very long."
Paris, May, 1907.
"Wouldn't youthink," asked Eugenia, looking about her, "that anybody who could get up such a room as this, such a perfect room, would know how to get herself up better?"
"You don't suppose for a minute that she doesn't know how to!" Marise rejoined. She added after a moment, to tease Eugenia, "Perhaps she thinks it ordinary to be chic. Perhaps she thinks it is more distinguished to have her very own genre."
Eugenia said with a nettled accent, "Well, wouldn't you think if she were going in for a genre of her own, she'd pick out one that was a little more ornamental than her flat-chested, old-maid, provincial school-teacher variety?"
Marise laughed. It always gave her a little malicious amusement to make Eugenia uneasy. To make her still more so, she added, "Yet you know well enough, Eugenia, in any room full of people, let Mme. Vallery come in with that mild, oh-I'm-nobody, don't-mind-me sort of air of hers, and everybody else looks like a dressmaker's mannequin."
Eugenia, alarmed for her standards, annoyed and aroused, disputed the point with warmth, "That's only because you know who she is. If you didn't, you'd take her for the concierge's country cousin."
Marise shook her head exasperatingly, "No you wouldn't. She hascachet. You can see it a mile away."
Eugenia suddenly conceded the point with grudging wonder, "How does shedoit?" she marveled, unreconciled.
"Personality," diagnosed Marise, and then seeing that Eugenia's face looked really clouded, she stopped her teasing abruptly, ashamed of the unkind impulse which drove her toit, and of the malicious pleasure she took in it. What was the inner irritation with everything that kept her so aware of other people's weak points and so easily led into playing ill-naturedly on them. Now, here and now, let her resolve she would never tease Eugenia again.
But she knew she would.
She did, however, resist an easy opening, given her by the next remark of Eugenia's, as she looked across the beautiful room, "Whatmakesit all so just right? I'm going to start in at that corner, and look at every single thing, and find outwhatmakes it right."
Marise restrained the mocking words on the tip of her tongue, and turned away to the half-open window, near which she stood. Across the empty street in the pale gold of the spring sunshine, the vaporous young green of the Luxembourg showed like a mist through the tall iron palings. The light blue sky above was veiled with hazy white clouds, stirred by a young little spring breeze, which blew languorously on the girl's cheek.
It came over her, all of it, with a soft rush, the invitation to life, the lovely, treacherous, ever-renewed invitation to live. And she drew back from it, with her ever-renewed determination not to be taken in by it. It was always too horribly lovely in May. It made her ache, it made her want to cry, it made her horribly unhappy. How detestable to have it so lovely, looking so seductive as though this were only the promise of something lovelier ... when there wasn't anything to redeem the promise, when it was all just a part of the general scheme to fool you.
Behind her Eugenia's voice said enviously, "Where did she get all these terribly quaint Louis XVI things?"
How thoroughly Eugenia's English diction teacher had rooted out that "turribly" of Eugenia's, thought Marise.
Aloud she answered, "She began collecting years ago, before anybody else thought of it."
"I shouldn't think a teacher would have much money to collect."
"Oh, she picked them up for nothing, in corners of whatever province she happened to be in, out of barns and chicken-houses and attics."
Eugenia said complainingly, "It seems to me she always has been able to pick up something for nothing. Look at her husband."
Marise said over her shoulder, "Oh, she didn't get much, when she got him. He never would have been anything except his good looks, if she hadn't taken him up. And she didn't get him for nothing—not much! Mlle. Hasparren says—every one who knows them says—that she made him. She writes his speeches now. I've seen her. And never bothers him by being jealous."
"I should hopenot," commented Eugenia. "She's ages older than he. And he's such a ripping good-looker."
Marise found Eugenia's fervent accent rather distasteful. Not that she minded her latest fad of finding married men so much more interesting subjects than the others. Eugenia's affairs never lasted more than a minute anyhow. But she wished Eugenia would pick out somebody with more brains than Mme. Vallery's husband, somebody not so well satisfied with himself.
"He's an awful imbecile," she said.
"What did Mme. Vallery marry him for, if she's so terribly intelligent?" challenged Eugenia. She delighted in using the words she had formerly mis-pronounced, and giving them the purest, most colorless intonation. There was not a trace now, in her speech, of the sweet, thick, unstrained honey of her original southern accent.
"She has brains for two," said Marise shortly, displeased by the direction of the talk. As a matter of fact, Mme. Vallery had once informed her why she had married her handsome, unintelligent husband. She had said warningly one day, when Marise had drawn back from a match Mme. Vallery had proposed for her, "Don't carry that too far, dear child. You will have to give in to the flesh sooner or later. You might as well do it young, before the growth of your intelligence spoils your enjoyment of it, as wait till you're driven to it, as I was. It's not amusing in the least, to have to take it all mixedwith the contempt of your brains. You'll find you have to take your share, one way or another."
Marise looked out frowningly at a great beech tree bursting into life in the garden across the street. It held its huge, flowering crest proudly into the spring air. To look at it was like hearing a flourish of trumpets, triumphal, exulting.
That was all very well for trees, thought Marise, that stupid, yearly emergence into a life that promised so much and brought futility.
Along the gravel-walk, inside the Luxembourg, under the hedge of lilacs, under the new splendor of the great beech, a young man and a girl in a pale gray dress were strolling. They looked at each other, and smiled.
"That's the way my father and mother probably walked together," thought Marise, wincing. "That" was one of the clumsiest, most obvious parts of the general conspiracy to fool you. But when you had the key to the code, as Marise had, there was little danger that you would be taken in.
"I think I hear them coming," said Eugenia, "I do hope Monsieur is with her! Not that he ever condescends to pay the slightest attention to me!" She assumed carefully a pose of unconscious ease on her small, spindle-legged chair. Marise turned around from the window and looked at her with appreciation. Was it only two years ago, that Eugenia had scrambled up from the crumpled bed on which she had lain a-sprawl?
"Nobody can sayyourgenre is not decorative, Eugenia," she remarked with the sincere intention of pleasing the other girl, "that's a perfectly glorious toilette, just right. And oh, how divinely that broadcloth is tailored."
Eugenia looked at her resentfully, with a flash of her old suspicion that she was not being treated as an equal.
"I haven't anycachet, and you know it," she said, "if Mme. Vallery can havecachetdo you suppose I'm going to be satisfied with just chic?"
Marise felt one of her claps of laughter rising within her, but kept it back, as the beautifully proportioned paneled door opened to admit their hostess. A tall, spare, stooped,gray-haired woman, dressed plainly in fine black, with a shrewd, wrinkled, fresh-colored face, well-washed and guiltless of the smallest trace of powder. She looked like an elderly Jesuit, one who wields a great deal more power than he likes to show.
"Good-day, my children," she greeted the girls in a clear voice, with the utmost simplicity and directness of intonation. "Have we kept you waiting long? I told Auguste that we were a little late."
Auguste, magnificently tall and magnificently bearded, having now followed her in, the four sacramental hand-shakes were accomplished, Eugenia's this time the promptest of all.
After the equally sacramental exchange of salutations and questions and answers had been achieved, questions as to health and general news, which did not in the least denote any interest in these matters, answers which were pronounced with perfunctory indifference and received in the same way, the necessary civilized preliminaries were considered disposed of, and the first moves of the game could be taken. M. Vallery's gambit was to say, looking admiringly at Eugenia, "Such a piece of the month of May oughtn't to be within four walls. Come over to the balcony a moment, and let me show you your sister, the Luxembourg, in flower."
Mme. Vallery's move was to sit in the winged, brocaded, deep-cushionedbergère, and motion Marise to sit beside her.
"Let's get our business done and off our hands first of all," she said, smiling up at the tall girl in an admiration as frank as her husband's for Eugenia, and for Marise, vastly more valuable.
The others, in a little chiming burst of chatter and high spirits, moved off towards the balcony. Mme. Vallery glanced after them with an inscrutable expression and then at Marise with a brisk, business-like manner.
The matter at issue just then, the occasion of the girls' call, was a fête de charité at the lycée, over which Mme. Vallery's sister was Directrice, shoved up to that position, so the lycée teachers said, by the political pull of Madame Vallery herself. But even they could not deny that the connection was highly advantageous for the lycée. There was not another one inParis, which felt itself more "protégé" in high places, more sure of its standing with the Ministry of Education. And its annual charity fête, from being the usual small-bourgeois bazar with home-made aprons and pin-cushions on sale, and perhaps an inexpensive conjuror pulling rabbits out of silk hats in the assembly-room to amuse the children, had become one of the most elaborate and unique annual events of the city. A good part of Tout-Paris lent its highly ornamental presence to these affairs, and helpless before Mme. Vallery's energy and acumen, always left much more of the contents of its purse than it had the slightest intention of leaving in the amusingly decorated stalls where pretty, well-trained amateur salesgirls sold the goods furnished at cost (under pressure from Mme. Vallery), by the most fashionable shops in Paris.
This year Marise had been asked to play, along with two other de la Cueva pupils, in the afternoon concert which was theclouof the three days' fête. Mme. Vallery had written her to ask her to come to talk over the choice of music, and to Eugenia's surprise and extreme pleasure had mentioned casually that she would be glad to see her pretty friend, Miss Mills, also. Marise had instantly wondered what she wanted to get out of Eugenia, and now behind her fresh, open, unlined young face she was hiding a determination to find out what, and to keep Eugenia from being unduly exploited. She might tease Eugenia herself, but she had an elder-sister feeling of protective care towards her. Eugenia was so awfully defenseless, in spite of her money, and so naïve still in spite of the sophisticated lore and manners which she had so energetically acquired. She had not learned that thorough-going suspicion of everything, which is the only valid protection against life.
But Mme. Vallery said nothing whatever about Eugenia, other than to comment in passing on how excessively pretty she was, a real late-Régence type, such as one seldom sees nowadays. Marise found herself, as usual, quite helpless before the Vatican antechamber suavity of the older woman, and reflected, not without some resentment, that she probably seemed as naïve to Mme. Vallery, as Eugenia did to her.
After some desultory talk about other features of the fête, they got out a pile of music, went together to the piano, where Marise tried the effects of various combinations, and finally decided on a desirable one.
All this time M. Vallery and Eugenia spent on the balcony, leaning over the railing, the sound of their voices and occasional laughter coming in pleasantly through the open windows. They came in together, when Mme. Vallery summoned them to share the Muscat and hard sweet biscuits which it was part of her genre to serve at four o'clock instead of the newly introduced tea.
"Business is over," she announced, settling herself in the chair back of the little stand, where the tray stood. "Now for some talk." She put her hand to the crystal carafe and held it there for a moment. Another of the ecclesiastical details of her appearance was the beauty of her hands, white and shapely.
M. Vallery seated the girls and then himself, smiling into his beautiful, glistening brown beard. Eugenia too was smiling, with a dazzled look of pleasure. Mme. Vallery looked down at the wine she was pouring. Marise suppressed a qualm of distaste for M. Vallery, and started the talk by laughing outright as at a sudden recollection of something comic. She explained that she had just had a letter from America, from an old cousin of her father, who always kept her au courant of the quaint and humorous goings-on of the country-side.
"Her letters are as good as a comic paper," said Marise, sipping her wine.
"Translatable?" asked M. Vallery, "most of the comic things that happen in the French country-side aren't. But they're very funny for all of that." He laughed reminiscently and stroked his beard.
Memories of Jeanne and Isabelle, and what they considered comic stories rose blackly to Marise's mind. She turned a gay, laughing face to M. Vallery and translated for his benefit Aunt Hetty's latest story about what happened when a skunk got into the hen-house, and she and Agnes went to the rescue at midnight in their night-gowns and night-caps. It was as muchto drown out what was going on inside her own mind, as to amuse the others that she did her liveliest best by the story, telling it with the gusto and brio which made her a favorite with people who liked youthful high spirits. It was broad farce, nothing else, and she did not draw back from the farcical color it needed to carry it off. It was a story, she told herself, that either made people laughaux éclats, or it was a failure. Her audience was certainly laughingaux éclatswhen she finished the account of the homeric night-battle, laughing and wiping their eyes.
"That reminds me," said M. Vallery, his eyes glistening with mirth, "of a story about a love-sick dog that my uncle used to have."
"You're not going to tell that story here," announced his wife, with the calm accent of mastery, which once in a while slipped from her in an unguarded moment. He went through the form of protesting, claiming that it was nothing—nowadays people were not prudish—but his wife settled the matter by taking the floor herself, turning to the girls, and saying laughingly, "That uncle of my husband's—he was one of the old school—out of a Balzac novel of the provinces. There aren't any more like him. It was through a to-the-death quarrel with him that Auguste and I met each other."
This slid her easily along into talk of early days, a quarter of a century before, when she was in one of the first lycées, at the time when lay-school teachers were an abomination and a hissing to the decent church-going bourgeois.
Dryly, with the inimitable terse picturesqueness of phrase which made her famous as a talker with people who demanded a great deal more than youthful high spirits, she took them back with her, twenty years, into the remote provincial city where she had encountered every narrowness possible to bigotry and reaction, and had wound it all around her little finger. Through her highly amusing recital of how she had played on the prejudices of those provincials, how adroitly she had employed against them their very vices, their jealousy and suspicion of each other, their grasping avarice, their utter dumb-beast ignorance of what modern education meant, throughall this played, like a little sulphurous flame, her acrid scorn and contempt for them, her vitriolic satisfaction in having cheated and beaten them, in having turned them inside out and made fools of them, without their ever once suspecting it. Her husband's admiration of her powers was boundless.
"That is now one of the most prosperous and successful lycées in eastern France," he told the girls, "and every year they have a big dinner with my wife as guest of honor, with speeches and things, and somebody lays a wreath on her as though she were a statue. Quite a joke, hein?"
"Well, that must be an enjoyable occasion indeed," thought Marise, seeing the scene as though she had been there; the simple-minded provincials, trying simple-mindedly to honor the founder of their lycée; Mme. Vallery sitting at the right hand of their Mayor, with her mild air of deprecating the too-great honor done her—and her little sulphurous flame of vitriolic contempt playing over the convolutions of her brain. "Yes, it is a very pretty world we live in," thought Marise, laughing heartily at Mme. Vallery's satirical imitation of one of the clumsy speeches made in her honor on the last occasion.
She thought it still a prettier world, when in the cab as she was accompanying Eugenia back to Auteuil, Eugenia said, radiating satisfaction, "I'm to have my part in the fête-de-charité, too!"
"Youare!" said Marise, "what are you going to do?"
"I'm going to give the money to pay for the appearance of a Russian dancer ... the very newest thing. It will be theclouof the entire fête. And my name is going on the program!"
"Eh bien!" cried Marise in the liveliest surprise, "why, I didn't hear a word about all this."
"No, it was in talking with M. Vallery that the plan was made. He hadn't dreamed of their being able to afford such a thing. It was my own idea. He was quite carried away by it, couldn't see how I came to think of it."
Marise was silent, meditating profoundly on the prettiness of the world in which we are called upon to live. The moreshe meditated, the hotter grew her resentment. It was all very well to be cynical, and it was foolish and raw to be surprised at cynicism, but this was a little ... really alittleexcessive! She flushed angrily as she went over in her mind the oiled exactitude with which each cog had slipped into the next, the casual invitation to Eugenia, M. Vallery's admiration of her beauty, the talk on the balcony ... oh, poor Eugenia! what a fool she must have seemed, with her naïve impression that it was her own idea! And how that fatuous barber's model must have laughed with his wife after they had left! The shameless team-work with which they had turned the talk to something far-away, and kept it there ... and, she flinched, her vanity cut to the quick, her own naïve blindness to the little game they were putting up on her. Well, she would know better next time. She had unpeeled one more layer from this pretty, pretty world of ours.
Speaking on impulse, she now said rather abruptly, to Eugenia, "I wouldn't have much to do with the Vallerys, if I were you. He's really an awful cad."