He had not imagined madame Vervier coming down to breakfast; but she was up long before it. Giles, looking from his window at seven, was astonished to see her form, wrapped in a white bath-robe, advancing leisurely from the cliff that she had, evidently, just ascended after a morning swim. She was alone. It was so early that she had awakened no one to share with her the delicate sting of the morning waves. Giles indeed imagined, watching her, that these early hours were set apart by her for solitude; that no one ever shared them with her. She walked, her russet head bent down, a little as she had walked in the Bois; meditating, it seemed. He heard her afterwards on the verandah, in the salon below, moving quietly to and fro. Her calm voice directed Albertine. “Ne réveillez pas mademoiselle. Elle est si fatiguée,” he heard.
A little while later, Albertine’s voice broke out far away, at the garden gate, in vehement yet not unfriendly altercation with the baker’s lady; and then, stealing deliciously into his sleepy senses, mingling with the fragrance of the carnations by his bedside, the aroma of roasting coffee-beans delicately tinctured the air. Albertine came in with a jug of steaming water and it was time to get up.
When he went down at half-past eight, monsieur de Valenbois was singing in the drawing-room with madame Vervier at the piano; the song was “D’Une Prison,” and he sang well.
Albertine was laying breakfast on the verandah, and Giles stood leaning against a pillar listening to the song. At its end madame Vervier soberly commended the singer, yet turned a leaf, here and there, to suggest an alteration. “Qu’as-tu fait de ta jeunesse?” monsieur de Valenbois sang again, with a new poignancy; and yet again. “Bien; très bien,” said madame Vervier’s quiet voice.
Then monsieur de Maubert appeared, and they came out to greet him and Giles. Monsieur de Maubert wore a small white woollen shawl over his shoulders and madame Vervier asked him with solicitude whether he would rather have breakfasted in thesalle-à-manger, as usual. It had seemed so deliciously mild a morning that she had told Albertine to lay the table here.
Monsieur de Maubert said he delighted in the plan. He would merely take precautions against acourant d’air; and to ensure him further from this calamity his chair was placed in a corner behind the table, Giles aiding in his disposal and amused by the idea of Jove sheltering from acourant d’air.
“Oh, breakfast here!Quel bonheur!” cried Alix, emerging. She made Giles think of a swallow as she skimmed out, her feet in their heellessespadrilleshardly seeming to touch the ground. André de Valenbois also, he saw, noted her swiftness, her light, direct movement; noted, too, no doubt, her clear face, stern in its carven structure, yet sweet in smile and glance. Alix was really growing up; she was already a person to be noted by a young man with an eye for beauty in all its manifestations, and Giles, while monsieur de Valenbois’ eyes rested almost musingly upon her, knew a fraternal, nay, almost a paternal, stir of anxious surmise. Would that be a solution? He did not feel the need of a solution for Alix’s problem to be so pressing as he had on the steamer yesterday. It was difficult in this radiantmilieuto believe her so in need of rescue. However heinous madame Vervier’s fault, she could not, without manifest priggishness, be seen as a mother unfit to care for a daughter. But problem or no problem, it would be a comfort to know Alix settled, and during coffee and rolls he began to see, very plainly, that this settlement must almost certainly have presented itself to madame Vervier. If André de Valenbois were here on these terms of happy intimacy, when her child arrived, had she not seen to it that he was here? Could she have chosen better? If Alix was charming, so was he; he was, indeed, Giles considered, having not thought much of Alix as in the category, more obviously charming than she was; a veritable prince of the fairy-tale in face, form, and demeanour, and if Alix was not already affected by his presence that could only be because she was still so much a child. He was not a young man to leave a maiden’s fancy unaffected.
“A penny for your thoughts, monsieur Giles,” monsieur de Valenbois’ voice broke in, disconcertingly, upon his meditations. That he had allowed them to become absorbing was evident to him from the smiles that met his eyes as he raised them. He felt himself foolishly blushing.
“Giles never talks much at breakfast,” Alix commented.
“I don’t get much chance to, at home, do I?” said Giles, grateful for her intervention.
“You shall have every chance here,” said madame Vervier. “We rarely have a young English philosopher among us. We must profit by the occasion.” Her smile was very kind.
“I know what monsieur Giles was thinking of,” said monsieur de Valenbois.
“Oh, no, you don’t,” Giles laughed.
“I wager you!” monsieur de Valenbois challenged him, tilting back his chair, his brilliantly blue eyes on his friend. “Do you defy me?”
“Absolutely,” said Giles.
“Well, own to my perspicacity when I tell you, then, that you were thinking about mademoiselle Alix. You were reassembling your arguments against the Russian ballet and reflecting that the best of them would be that it is idle to go to art for something we can find more perfectly displayed in nature.”
Giles stared at him. It was near enough to cause him to stare.
“Well?” smiled monsieur de Valenbois.
“How did you know I was thinking about Alix?” Giles demanded.
“How did I know?—Because I was!” laughed monsieur de Valenbois. “And the same thoughts.”
Madame Vervier was looking at them both, and again, Giles imagined, with her veiled vigilance. “The Russian ballet?” she questioned. “What has Alix to do with the Russian ballet?”
“Forgive my execrable taste,chère madame!” exclaimed monsieur de Valenbois, “in making mademoiselle Alix the subject of these divinations! But did you remark the way in which she bounded out of the house just now? It was a remarkable bound,” smiled monsieur de Valenbois. “It started the same strain of thought in me and in monsieur Giles, you see. We were discussing the Russian ballet last night.”
“But I wasn’t thinking about the Russian ballet,” Giles rather helplessly protested, and he felt madame Vervier not quite pleased. “That’s what I should have thought, no doubt, if it had come to my mind. But it didn’t.”
“Ah; but the essential you will not deny,” said monsieur de Valenbois, and Giles, feeling his blushes mount again, wondered just how far the essential had indeed been divined.
Alix was gazing first at him, then at monsieur de Valenbois and then at her mother; and her mother’s eyes, while they caressed and approved her silence, put her aside into the retirement suitable to ajeune fille.
“Monsieur Giles has disowned the essential,” she remarked.
“Do you like him, Giles?” Alix questioned when, after breakfast, she moved off with her friend to the cliff-path.
Giles really felt a little abashed before her calm; felt that he deserved, rather than monsieur de Valenbois, madame Vervier’s implicit reproof.
“Monsieur de Valenbois?” he questioned. “Very much. Don’t you? I think him charming.”
“Charming,” Alix reflected.
“Have you known him for a long time?” Giles inquired.
“A long time? I?” Alix’s eyes came back to him surprised. “I never saw him before.”
“Really. He’s a new friend of your mother’s, then.”
“Yes. They met at Cannes last winter,” said Alix. “Charming. He is that, I suppose; but I think it a littleagaçantfor anyone to look so sure of happiness.”
“Sure of happiness? You think he looks that?”
“Yes. As if, always, he had had everything he wanted. That is a littleagaçant, I think. Though of course it is not his fault.”
“It may be only a part of his intelligence, his general tact and taste, to look it,” Giles suggested. “He would always be thinking about his responsibilities towards his surroundings. If he wasn’t happy, nobody would know it.”
“But would that not be for his own sake rather than for theirs? He would feel it a disadvantage to look unhappy,” said Alix.
“But he’s so kind,” said Giles. “He seems to me, now that I come to think of it, even more kind than he is charming. He’s been most awfully kind to me already.”
“And why should he not be?” Alix inquired. She took off her hat and the morning breeze blew back her hair.
“Well, I’m a rather unprepossessing young foreigner. I shouldn’t have known how to be kind to him.”
“He is quicker on the surface than you are, Giles; but you are quite as quick beneath it, and deeper far, I feel sure,” said Alix.
“Hang it!” said Giles, laughing, “how do you manage to think these things at your age?”
“I am of an age, it appears, to have monsieur de Valenbois discuss my appearance in my presence,” said Alix.
“Oh—but just because you are so young,” Giles, already alarmed for the good fortune of his romance, protested.
“Ah, but if I were as young as you mean, I should not be worth discussing,” Alix returned.
Giles glanced at her from the tail of his eye. How young, how old, indeed, was Alix. His sense of a suffering only biding its time to spring upon her came strongly to him as he scanned surreptitiously the high young face that seemed to soar beside him, the vast background lending an added haughtiness to its delicate projections. How French, how French she was; how much a foreigner with all her familiarity; so much so that he could not, even now, foresee what she would feel, what love, what suffer. “And monsieur Jules;—I’ve never heard anyone call him anything but Jules.—And mademoiselle Fontaine? Give me your impressions of all these people,” he said. “They are so strange and new to me.”
“Poor Jules. I am fond of him. Very. I have known him for many years,” said Alix. “Ever since Maman admired a picture of his and bought it and then found him, starving, with his little wife. Maman has been their good angel always. Success is coming to him now; now when it is too late. And mademoiselle Fontaine is an oldhabituéeof Maman’s salon. I have not seen her in the country before. She has taken this little villa for the summer to be near Maman. She does not seem to belong to the country. We will go one day to have tea with her and her mother and old grandmother and see the little ‘fox,’ ” Alix added. “Her grandmother knew Chopin. She will tell you so at once; and George Sand. She was an actress, too. I do not think that I care much for actresses.”
“And was mademoiselle Fontaine’s mother an actress?”
“Oh, not at all. Her mother is quite different.Une bonne petite bourgeoise tout simplement; quite insignificant and creeping. They both adore the grandmother. You must see them,” Alix repeated, a slight amusement on her lips, as if she spoke of quaint animals she had to display to her friend.
He and Alix and monsieur de Valenbois bathed before luncheon. Bathing at Les Chardonnerets was a rather arduous affair. One undressed in one’s room and ran out over the cliff-top inespadrillesand bath-robe. The long iron staircase down the face of the cliff was almost as steep as a fire-escape in places, and at the bottom there was shingle to traverse and then, if the tide was low, as on this morning, a stretch of wet sand. Giles was an excellent swimmer and so was monsieur de Valenbois. Alix, not yet proficient, though her stroke was good, swam between them out to sea, and Giles, as he and the young Frenchman smiled at each other over her dark head, felt a growing assurance for his romance. André de Valenbois, he saw, found Alix a charming young creature, and what could be a better beginning than that? She rested, when they turned to come back, holding first Giles by the shoulders and then monsieur de Valenbois.
Madame Vervier was sitting on the grass, high against the sky. She watched them from under a white sunshade, monsieur de Maubert, under a green-lined one, extended beside her. “Now let me swim again and show her how much progress I have made,” said Alix, and she bravely pointed her hands through the waves, Giles and André beside her, exhorting, directing, commending. Giles felt that madame Vervier, on her height, watched it all complacently. Complacently, yet with that vigilance, too. Alix was given the full liberty of thejeune fille moderne; but he had already noted that however far and free her roamings her mother was always aware of when, how, and with whom they took place.
It so befell that Giles made the acquaintance of mademoiselle Fontaine’s family that very day. Madame Vervier and monsieur de Valenbois went off for a long motor drive and it was arranged with mademoiselle Fontaine, who appeared soon after the swim, that Giles and Alix were to drink tea with her and Maman and Grand’mère at their cottage. Monsieur de Maubert was spending the afternoon with friends in the country.
The smallest, most smiling little house it was, that of mademoiselle Fontaine’s family. It stood behind a pink-and-grey wall in a tiny garden and when they entered the gate at four o’clock they were welcomed by the fox terrier, and found old madame Dumont, crumpled up in black draperies and under a black parasol all lace and fringes, sitting out in the sun on the flagged path with a row of white and purple petunias leading up to her. Mademoiselle Fontaine stood behind her chair and gently but forcibly shouted their names to her, and mademoiselle Fontaine’s mother, who did not bear her name, but was plain madame Collet, emerged from the house with a tray of tea and coffee. She was a stout, pale little woman with a high, old-fashioned bosom and prominent, old-fashioned hips and an old-fashioned fringe across her faded forehead. Careful, cautious, grave and happy, she seemed as one who moved among precious objects to whose well-being and security she knew herself essential. “Is that as you wish it, Blanche?” Giles heard her whisper to her daughter; and to her mother, “You are warm enough, Maman?”
As for Grand’mère, Giles, in spite of Alix’s intimations, was hardly prepared for such a fearsome old lady. Very fearsome he found her, peering shrewdly up at him through the fringes of her parasol with the beady eye of an old raven under a dark-blue beetling eyebrow. She was powdered and dyed, and an erection of black lace ornamented her ample indigo wig and fell in lappets on either side of her long Semitic cheeks. Her smile was histrionic and her voice hoarse as if with years of use for public purposes. Now and then she emitted a loud gong-like laugh, and Giles could somehow imagine her, so full of vitality did she still seem, standing in classic draperies on a vast stage and bellowing forth passages from Victor Hugo. She talked almost immediately of Chopin and mademoiselle Fontaine stood leaning on the back of her chair listening to her as if she felt the rôle of listener, for herself as well as for them, a privilege. Giles could not but admire what, he supposed, was the effect of the French tradition of family life. It was difficult to associate an intelligence as versatile as mademoiselle Fontaine’s with this derelict antiquity, and even more difficult to think of her as the daughter of the homespun little person who poured out their tea and coffee. But mademoiselle Fontaine showed no sign, apologetic or explanatory, of finding anything amiss with either of them, and if her manner towards madame Collet was often curt and authoritative, an affection that could show itself at moments in quite a pretty playfulness evidently underlay it.
“See what a naughty little mother I have, monsieur Bradley,” she exclaimed. “She pretends always to forget that I do not like my afternoon coffee made with chicory. In the morning, yes; I admit it; later in the day, no. Ah, Maman! no excuses!!Je vous connais.Economy is the motive!—She has never escaped the fear that unless one saves all one’ssousone may die in indigence.”
“Chicory, Blanche? What do you say of chicory?” the old lady inquired, leaning an ear towards her grandchild. “Mais c’est très sain, la chicorée. Ca rafraichit le sang.—If you drink chicory every day in your coffee”—and now it was an eye she turned, half closed in sagacious admonition, on the startled Giles—“you will not need to purge yourself, my young man.”
“Fi donc, Grand’mère!We do not talk ofl’hygiènenow!” laughed mademoiselle Fontaine.
“Ah, it is a thing never to forget,” said madame Dumont. “If Chopin had not neglected his health, how many more works of genius he would have given to the world.—He was my master, did I tell you, monsieur Gillet?”—mademoiselle Fontaine had not succeeded in conveying Giles’s name to her in a retainable form. “I had great talent for the piano. It was said to me, when I chose the theatre as a career, that it was one I chose and one I threw away.—You have heard of George Sand in England?”
Giles said that they heard of her.
“Femme exécrable!” madame Dumont exclaimed. “Femme sans cœur!How many lives did she not destroy!”
“Ah, but I am always on the side of the woman, when it comes toles affaires de cœur,” said mademoiselle Fontaine, with a smile at Giles. “We are so often the losers that I feel a certain satisfaction when a woman, even if ruthlessly, redresses the balance. And with all its romanticism, what a great talent it was, that of the good George! Do not say too much ill of her.”
“Good! You can call a woman good who tricks one lover under the nose of the other! Do you forget Pagello and Alfred de Musset!” cried madame Dumont. “As for Musset; let it pass; he was not one to be pitied.—But Chopin! A man as simple as a child.Non. C’était un monstre!” madame Dumont declared.
“And I will leave you to tell monsieur Giles what you think of George Sand while I ask mademoiselle Alix to come upstairs with me and see a new dress that has come from Paris,” said mademoiselle Blanche, thus further demonstrating her intelligence to Giles, for indeed madame Dumont’s reminiscences had begun to make him uneasy.
Alix had picked up the friendly “fox” and was giving scant attention; but once her impeding presence was removed, madame Dumont’s recitals took on a disconcerting raciness and when, presently, madame Collet gathered together the tea-things and carried away the tray, the old lady, as if she had bided her time, lurched towards Giles, with a terrible leering smile, to whisper: “Elle est belle, n’est-ce pas, madame Vervier?”
“Très belle,” said Giles, drawing away a little.
“Sa fille ne sera jamais aussi belle,” whispered madame Dumont. “She need not fear her. What fate more pitiful for a beautiful woman than to find a rival in her daughter!”
“Nothing of that sort could ever happen between Alix and her mother,” said Giles angrily.
“Nothing of that sort.Précisément.You, a young man, and I, an old woman, see eye to eye when it comes to such a comparison,” madame Dumont disconcertingly concurred. “La petiteAlix is not of a type to seduce. She has distinction; an air of race;mais elle n’est pas séduisante!—Tandis que la mère!”—and madame Dumont, with eye and hand uplifted, took Heaven to witness of her appreciation.
“That’s not what I mean at all. You quite misunderstand me,” said Giles, more angrily.
“Vous dites, monsieur?” said madame Dumont, fixing a very shrewd, sharp eye upon him as if she suddenly discerned new aspects of an obvious case. “It is the daughter you admire?”
Madame Collet reappeared and Giles maintained a hostile silence. To attempt to enlighten madame Dumont would be futile.
“It is time for yourrepos, Maman,” said madame Collet. “She is so old, so very old, monsieur,” she added, casting a glance of proud possessorship upon Giles. “Only by constant care do we keep her with us. And now it is time for the little afternoon nap.”
The old lady, muttering something about chicory andhygiène, signified her readiness to withdraw and Giles assisted her daughter in hoisting her upon her feet. But for all her decrepitude she was still not lacking in female sensitiveness and had time, it was evident, to make her reflections upon something unflattering in the attitude of the young Englishman, for, before she disappeared into the house, she bade him farewell with an extreme and sudden haughtiness.
Alix soon came down after that and they went away.
“Well?” smiled Alix. “And did you appreciate the celebrated madame Dumont?”
Her smile hurt Giles. Its unconsciousness of what madame Dumont really meant; her ignorance of what such old harpies thought and said of her mother. “Horrible old creature!” he could not repress.
“Horrible?” Alix was evidently surprised. “That is very severe.”
“I want to be severe. I think she is quite horrible.”
“It is always horrible to be so old. But she is not stupid, Giles. She has been a great actress; at least, almost great. Monsieur de Maubert saw her act years ago, and says that it was good. And sometimes she will still repeat one of her famous scenes—as Phèdre or Athalie—to make one’s blood run chill.”
“She makes my blood run chill without any acting,” said Giles.
“C’est la belle madame Vervier,” said a contemplative voice behind him, and Giles, glancing round, as he sat in the thatched chalet overlooking the tennis courts, saw that it was the lady in grey who spoke.
He had played tennis all the morning with Alix, André de Valenbois and another young man, a friend of André’s, who had motored over from a neighboring château, and now that they had come back after tea, and, with madame Vervier added to their number, made a quartette without him, he watched them from the chalet, with a book. The small old houses and large new villas of Allongeville climbed a valley that rose in a wooded amphitheatre about the little watering-place and the tennis grounds lay just outside it, pleasantly disposed, the highroad with its poplars on one hand and on the other a hillside of tall grasses and wild flowers.
Giles that afternoon had strolled back into the town to look at the church and buy some tobacco. He liked the church, with its austere, benignant Gothic and whitewashed cool interior, clumsy wooden beams meeting in fishes’ heads above his head and clumsy old wooden figures of saints standing against the pillars. Saint Martin was there with his cloak and the beggar; Saint Roch and his dog and a little round-faced Virgin Mary at the knee of Saint Anne. It was a homely, intimate church and a sense of peace fell upon the perplexed heart of Giles as he wandered about it. He wished, or almost wished, that he could kneel with as simple a faith as the washerwoman who set down her basket of snowy clothes in the aisle and said her rosary before the bright modern statue of the Virgin. The mere sense of haven expressed in the attitude of a sleeping old fisher-woman, with bare legs and hair like tangled seaweed, was enviable. Giles would have found comfort in placing a taper to burn on Toppie’s behalf before the gold-crowned Virgin and he would have liked to doze beside the fisher-woman and feel that he had a right to do so. And although he did not belong there, the church seemed to accept his presence with a special placidity and kindliness as though it saw in him merely a strayed sheep. It was the true fold, it seemed to say, and it could afford to await, for centuries if need be, the return of all such wanderers.
From the church he crossed theplace, paved with cobbles and bright with awninged shops, and entered a leafy path that led up to the cliff-top. A bench was placed in a grassy recess where one could sit and look out at the sea, and it was while he rested there that Giles saw the lady in grey emerge from a white house further up the cliff-side; a tall, sad, slender, beautifully dressed woman of middle-years, whose face, turned on him as she passed, made him think, with its inscrutable calm and mild dignity, of the face of a Japanese lady. As much as the Japanese lady, Giles felt, she belonged to an order, and the meaning of life for her would be in the fulfilling its requirements.
He was glad to see her reappear after he had established himself in the doorway of the chalet. A friend was with her, a stout, dark, sagacious person, and theirs were evidently the young people who played in a further court.
Giles rose when they entered and inquired whether his smoke incommoded them, and the lady in grey, seeing again the stranger of the cliff-seat, smiled kindly and said: “Mais pas du tout, monsieur.” She was charming with her slanting eyes and delicate, faded face. She carried still further, though, as it were to a different conclusion, the impression that madame Vervier had so strongly made upon him, of always knowing what she meant to do and of saying what she meant to say. Even her manner of bowing her head and smiling as she replied to him had a technique. That was the only word for it. They had a technique for everything, these French people, Giles more and more clearly saw it, and not only the Samurai-like ladies, but the peasants, the shop-keepers, the maids and waiters. If you presented them with a new situation, they passed the novelty by and gave you the old answer.
The friends looked about them. The stout lady had a long piece ofbroderie anglaise, fastened, for more facility, to a strip of glazed green leather. The lady in grey had silk and a fine steel crochet needle. Giles could just see her long white hands from where he sat, with rings of black enamel set with pearls, and the long earrings on either side of her long white face were also of pearl and enamel.
They observed the play of the four courts. Madame Vervier and her party played in the nearest, and what more natural than that the lady in grey should make her quiet comment. But though there was no disparagement in her voice, Giles felt a slight discomfort in hearing her. Had she not noted him as a foreigner and seen him as unattached, she would not, he knew, so have alluded to his hostess.
“Tiens!” said the stout dark lady, and she laid down her embroidery to look at Alix’s mother.
Madame Vervier playing tennis became an Artemis for speed, strength, lightness. She flashed there in the sunlight before them, her russet locks bound with white, her beautiful arms bare in the white tennis dress, her slender white-shod feet exquisite in their unerring improvisation. Her uplifted face, though so intent, had a curious look of indolent power.
“And the tall child, is she the daughter?” the dark lady inquired.
“I believe so. Yes. The daughter. She bears the name of Mouveray,” said the lady in grey.
“Mouveray.Précisément.Her husband divorced her?”
“Or she him. I do not remember. I do not know where the fault lay.”
“And this is the husband’s child?”
“Ah, that,ma chère, is more than I can tell you,” said the lady of the earrings with a touch of melancholy humour. “But she, also, is beautiful. I find her more beautiful than the mother.”
“But with less charm,” said the stout lady, evidently of madame Dumont’s opinion, and she had even something of madame Dumont’s expression in pronouncing it. “La mère est toute-à-fait séduisante. C’est une femme exquise.”
“But the child has more distinction,” said the lady of the earrings.
“It is a head that would tell well on the stage,” the stout lady suggested. “And speaking of the theatre I saw mademoiselle Blanche Fontaine bathing here the other day. She is very well in the water.”
“Yes. She is staying near madame Vervier at Les Vaudettes. She is a friend. The child is perhaps destined for the theatre.—I can hardly imagine mademoiselle Fontaine in the water,” and the lady of the earrings smiled. “I can hardly see her off the stage.”
“Ah, she is very well in the water,” the stout lady again asserted. “Elle est fausse maigre.And she swims as well as she acts. What a talent it is?”
“A little shrill, a little metallic, perhaps,” said the lady of the earrings; but the stout lady was quite secure of her admiration and said that she considered mademoiselle Fontaine the foremost of their young actresses.
A little silence followed, and Giles, who had contemplated withdrawal, settled himself again to his book when the talk, as the friends resumed it, turned on their families. The stout lady spoke of her Jacques at the Ecole Polytechnique; ofle petitCharlot and his love for music. The lady of the earrings spoke of Andrée, who would soon be old enough to marry, and of Grand-père, left up at the white house on the cliff with Yvonne to entertain him.Ma tantearrived to-morrow to open Les Mouettes and was bringing areligieuse, an admirable woman, who was to take charge of Grand-père. “Quel homme surprenant,” said the stout lady, and the lady in grey said that he was, indeed, wonderful. “Eighty-two, and interesting himself still in all our lives. I was discussing Andrée’s marriage with him yesterday. We are fortunate, indeed, in having kept him so long with us.”
Giles, as he half listened, gained a further impression, after his impression of the Dumontmilieu, different, yet vividly the same in its one essential, of the solidly, complicatedly built structure of French family life; its dependencies; its responsibilities; its ramifications. They all meant each other. They all lived with and for each other, and the longer they lived the more important they became, thus inversing the natural course of family life in England. Andrée, old enough to marry, was a very insignificant person compared to Grand-père.
“And who is the young man with madame Vervier?” asked the stout lady, who had evidently just arrived at Allongeville, since she thus plied her friend with queries. “The little one is René Claussel, I know.—But the tall one? He is as handsome as madame Vervier herself.”
“That is André de Valenbois. My uncle named him to me yesterday.Charmant garçon, n’est-ce pas?”
“André de Valenbois! But is he not to marry Babette de Cévrieux’s daughter? Surely I have heard something of a marriage in contemplation there.”
“Ah. That is a sad story. It was, indeed, arranged; the preliminaries, that is to say, in progress; the young people brought together; two very pretty little fortunes and a happily matched young pair. But it is owing, precisely, to madame Vervier that all has come to a standstill, as you can imagine from seeing him with her. He is the present lover. They were in Italy together last winter.”
“But surely I heard of monsieur de Maubert as the present lover.”
“Ah—no; that is ancient history. My uncle, who knows monsieur de Maubert, believes that the relation, for years, has been platonic. There have been many names since he was favoured. He is with her now, and it may, of course, be that he is anamant complaisant, though it does not seem probable. André de Valenbois, at all events, is the lover of the moment, and from what I see and hear poor Babette will have to be patient if she still thinks of him for Rose-Marie. A vulgar love would have been less devastating in a young man’s life.”
Giles now got up. Thrusting his book into his pocket he stood for a moment staring out at the tennis players. He could not pass them without speaking to them and thus reducing to painful confusion his unconscious informants. Yet he must get away. After a moment of hot uncertainty, he turned sharply round the chalet and began, behind it, to climb the hillside.
Well?—in what way was it a surprise? He almost challenged his sick dismay with the question as he went knee-deep through the daisies and scabious. Had not the horrible old woman’s intimations of the day before prepared him for it? Had he really cherished the belief that madame Vervier, after her first disaster, might have known no other love than Owen? But the sickness answered for him. He had cherished just these beliefs, and if madame Dumont had left his illusions unimpaired while the ladies of the chalet destroyed them, that was because the first was an old harpy while the latter were women of madame Vervier’s own world; of what had been her world. The truth, now, was not to be evaded. Alix’s mother was a light woman; an immoral woman; only not of thedemi-mondebecause, he might still believe it, she was not mercenary. His heart was cold with repudiation as he climbed. Owen was belittled by what he had learned; Toppie was more basely wronged; Alix’s poor, proud little face sank beneath the waters. What spar of pride would be left for Alix to cling to when she knew? What would she feel?
But what did those women feel? Suddenly, the racial difference more sharply revealed to him than ever, he was aware that the cold repudiation was for them, too. It was the colder because of their kindness. They were safe in the citadel of their order. They were kind because they were safe. Because they were safe they accepted the jungle as having its own and its different code. They strolled peacefully along the city walls and looked down at the bright, prowling, supple creature without the city, and commented on its skill and beauty. One might almost say that the jungle itself was part of the order, since thedemi-mondainewas taken as much for granted as thefemme du monde. The bright creature was seen as dangerous, no doubt, to adventurers such as André de Valenbois; but Giles surmised that the danger was not great. Inconvenient was the apter word; inconvenient to the plans of themères de famille. Young men who belonged to the citadel had, as it were, the freedom of the jungle; that was where it came into the order; for their pleasure. They issued forth to adventure; but they came back, they always came back—to Babette’s daughter—in the end. Cruel; abominable, such tolerance, such connivance, combined with such repudiation. For it was there that Giles’s austere young eyes saw the evil manifest, while the conception of a social structure more complicated and more rigid than any England could ever produce grew upon his vision. For nothing was worse than cruelty, and what was more cruel than to repudiate after you had connived?
And where did Alix, child of the citadel, but habitant of the jungle, come into the picture? His mind turned to her as he had left her, leaping in the sunlight, her head thrown back, her arm uplifted; straight, white, unaware.
He felt himself looking steadily at Alix, eliminating her companion from his field of vision. He could not look at André de Valenbois yet. He could never look at him and at Alix, together, again. The memory of his romance for them gave him almost a qualm of terror. André as an individual was hideously eliminated from any such romance; but, as a type, Giles could feel between him and madame Vervier’s daughter no disparity or inappropriateness; none if he were a man with a spark of generosity or insight. But, as he looked at Alix and her future, Giles saw that for young men of the French citadel generosity and insight were sentiments strictly appointed and conditioned. They did not enter into the choice of a wife. How could they, since the choice was made as much by Grand-père at eighty-two, by all the family, as by the young man himself. There was in her own country no future for Alix at all; that was what he saw quite plainly as he turned down from the hillside a mile beyond Allongeville and marched across the road and made his way up the opposite rise of meadow towards Les Vaudettes.
He was striding along the upland now, among the fields of golden grain. The sea-breeze blowing on his face seemed to speak of Alix, and his thoughts, almost with a sense of tears, dwelt on her, on what he divined of the child’s nature; so young, yet so mature; so sensitive, yet so hard; and above all so passionately loyal. What would she feel when she knew the truth?—He came back to the first question. They must all have an order, a code, these strange French people. They none of them stood alone. The individual was implicated through every fibre in the group to which he belonged. Would Alix, when she knew, accept the jungle and its code? What else was there for her to do? Giles was asking himself this fundamental question by the time he reached Les Chardonnerets and was finding the only answer to it. There was nothing that Alix could do. But he could do something. He and his mother and all of them. Keep her. Away from the jungle; and away from the citadel, too. “Damn it!” Giles heard himself remarking as he marched towards the verandah. “It thinks itself too good for her and she’s too good for it. She shall belong to us. It’s the only way out,” said Giles.
He had mounted the steps, head bent, hands thrust deeply into his pockets, and had actually cast himself into a garden-chair before he saw that he was not alone. Over there in the corner near the little table where the reviews and newspapers were laid, and the fluttering vines tempered the sunlight, sat monsieur de Maubert, a book upon his knee and his eyeglasses on his nose. He was looking above them, across at Giles, and the young man was terribly disconcerted in seeing him.
“I beg your pardon,” he muttered; “I didn’t know anybody was here.”
“I have only just returned,” said monsieur de Maubert in his Olympian tones, “and there is no occasion for apology. You were coming fast and you were thinking deep. You seem disturbed, Monsieur. Has anything occurred to incommode you?”
Giles had pulled his chair around a little so that he faced monsieur de Maubert and as he heard the suave question he suddenly determined to answer it. Whatever monsieur de Maubert’s past relation to madame Vervier, he felt assured from what he had observed that his present one was based on a disinterested devotion. If he must try to persuade madame Vervier to give Alix up to them, it would assuredly be as well to gain monsieur de Maubert’s sympathy.
“To tell you the truth, I am incommoded,” he said. “I’ve had a very nasty shock. Is that right?Un mauvais coup?—Well, you understand, I’m sure. We’re so fond of Alix, all of us, my mother and brothers and sisters; she almost seems to belong to us; and I’ve just been hearing two women talking at the tennis about her, and her mother; and about her future. Nice women. And they seemed to think there wasn’t any future for her except the theatre.”
“Well?” monsieur de Maubert removed his glasses as if for a more unimpeded observation of his companion. “And what is amiss with the theatre? You did not, evidently, suppose that they narrowed the opportunities of a young girl such as Alix to that career only; but it will suffice for the argument. What is amiss with it? It may be a great career for a woman of talent. Our friend mademoiselle Fontaine, for example, has made for herself a distinguished name.”
Giles felt that his face was hot, but he went doggedly on: “I know. I’m not belittling it. But, from the way they spoke, I infer it’s not what it is with us.”
“A playground for pretty amateurs? A display of dressmakers’mannequins? No; it is not. We are a more serious people than you when it comes to art.”
Giles was not to be abashed. “With us it is one honourable alternative among others. It’s a career any young girl can follow, except among old-fashioned, prejudiced people. And I mean young girls of good character; of good standing.”
“What you mean, I think,” said monsieur de Maubert, “is that with us it is not seen as a suitable career for ajeune fille du monde. Alix is not ajeune fille du monde.”
“No; I don’t mean only that,” said Giles.
“Or perhaps that it is not with us a careerpour une vierge,” monsieur de Maubert further defined. “There you are right. I do not easily imagine a great actress who is not also a woman of experience. That is all that it comes to, is it not?”
Giles wondered for a moment if this, indeed, was all that it came to for him. He had not thought of it in those terms, and it gave him an added chill to find that monsieur de Maubert did. “What it comes to for me,” he said, “is that I don’t think it a suitable career for Alix;—precisely because of what you say; and what’s more, I don’t believe her mother does, either.”
At this monsieur de Maubert was silent for some moments, and in the silence Giles felt anew that, ambiguous, even sinister as he might be, his sympathy could be counted upon where any interest of madame Vervier’s was in question. If he reflected thus carefully, it was, Giles felt, because from Alix they had passed to madame Vervier.
“You are right. Her mother is with you,” he said at last, surprisingly. “It is because she is with you that she sent the child last winter. She sees the difficulties that you see. She would prefer, to any artistic career in France, that Alix should marry in England. Marriage is what she intends for her. She would, I am sure, be glad to talk of any possibilities for Alix with you.”
“I hope she’ll let me have a talk with her; I’m glad of what you tell me,” Giles muttered, though bewildered by monsieur de Maubert’s calm assumptions.
And he was going on as calmly: “For myself, I do not know that I am in agreement with her. Where her child is concerned, she shows, at times, for a woman so gifted and so sagacious, a certain conventionality of outlook. She who, for herself, has chosen the path of freedom, should have more courage for her child.”
“Isn’t it something of a criticism of the path of freedom that she doesn’t choose it for her child?” Giles felt himself impelled to comment. “Aren’t all mothers conventional when it comes to their daughters? Isn’t convention, in that sense, only another name for safety?”
“Ah; you are a shrewd young man,” said monsieur de Maubert with a smile. “Perhaps it is. Personally I feel that for our little friend the free life of the artist would be a happier one than the life of the English country lady. That life, for a vivid, vigorous nature such as hers, would be, I should imagine,bornée;fade.”
“I don’t see why it should,” said Giles. “But I wasn’t thinking of country ladies, or of marriage at all. We don’t think of marriage like that. I thought of Alix making her living in England. I thought of a life where she would have love and respect about her and be useful and happy.”
“I do not think that such a prospect would at all attract her mother,” monsieur de Maubert remarked. “I do not see what more advantage it offers than a similar life in France. Do you consider, then, that madame Vervier has not love and respect about her and is not useful and happy?”
Giles at this, struck to silence, sat staring at monsieur de Maubert.
“You have doubtless,” monsieur de Maubert continued—and Giles saw that it was not through any inadvertence that he had thus placed the situation of madame Vervier squarely between them; without any embarrassment, without any hesitation, he calmly selected the theme—“you have doubtless heard those women speaking of our hostess as if they did not respect her.”
“Not quite that,” Giles muttered. “They spoke merely as if she didn’t count with them at all.”
“And do you imagine,” monsieur de Maubert inquired, “that they count with her?”
In spite of his confusion Giles could answer this question immediately. “They count with her for Alix,” he said.
“For Alix?” monsieur de Maubert mildly, yet perhaps not quite ingenuously, questioned.
“You’ve owned to it yourself,” said Giles. “It’s their life she’d want for Alix. The safe life. The respected life. She’d rather that Alix should marry one of their sons than be the most wonderful of actresses.”
“It may be so. Gifted and sagacious people have their weaknesses. You speak again of respect,” said monsieur de Maubert. “All those who are honoured with her friendship respect madame Vervier. You speak of marriage. What wife can hope for adoration? Madame Vervier is adored as well as respected.”
“I should have said that a wife could hope for adoration—and for fidelity as well,” Giles returned.
“Very rarely,” monsieur de Maubert smiled. “And I do not imagine that our hostess—of whom I speak thus openly because I see that between us there is nothing to conceal—has ever had to fear infidelity. She is in the fortunate position of a woman free to choose. She gives happiness when and to whom she wishes.”
Giles sat battling with a confusion of thoughts. He had not meant to discuss madame Vervier with anybody. It was horrible to him that he and monsieur de Maubert should thus be discussing her. But without implying her present it was impossible to discuss Alix’s future. “I don’t call it fortunate,” he said. “I don’t call it happiness.”
“You do not call it happiness to love and to be loved?” monsieur de Maubert inquired. “You have, perhaps, mystic consolations, monsieur Giles; but to the majority of our poor humanity this will always remain the one authentic happiness of life.”
“We have different ideas,” said Giles. “I don’t see love like that. When you speak of her giving happiness, you mean, I suppose, that she has had a great many lovers. That is what those women said. I think that a tragic life, you see; and the more tragic, the more lovely the woman is who leads it.”
“A great many?” monsieur de Maubert weighed it. “Hardly that. She is a serious, not a frivolous woman; and beauty accompanies her always.”
“You see, we have different ideas,” Giles heavily repeated, looking down and tugging at the wicker of his chair. “A love that can be repeated over and over, I don’t call love.”
“Bonté divine!” monsieur de Maubert laughed suddenly among the vines. “A fountain cannot throw itself into the air repeatedly and remain itself? Spring cannot return to us again and again? It is with our hearts as with nature; a renewal; a discovery of fresh beauty. And since we are all different, with each new love there is the discovery of new beauty.”
“Love to me means nothing—worse than nothing—unless it means dedication; permanence; unity,” said Giles.
“Ah, but then it ceases to be love,” said monsieur de Maubert, “and becomes duty, affection, the joys and cares of thefoyer; what the wives—if they are fortunate—may count on. A young man like you is surely aware of the difference between love the passion, and love the affection. We feel the latter for our wives and mothers; we feel something very different for our mistresses.—You will agree to that, I think.”
“I’ve never had a mistress,” said Giles.
“Tiens!” It was an exclamation of blended amusement, astonishment and most courteous respect for a strange idiosyncrasy, and Giles saw monsieur de Maubert in his dappled sunlight opening large eyes.
“What I’d like to ask you, if I may,” said Giles, “is what you feel for mistress number one when mistress number two has deposed her; and what you feel for number two when you are devoting yourself to number three. You can’t feel passion for them all, at the same time, I suppose. The present lady preoccupies you. What of the others, then? Have they ceased to arouse any solicitude or interest?”
“From the fact that they are gone, far less,” monsieur de Maubert owned, shifting himself now in his chair the better to contemplate his companion. “One may think of them with gratitude or regret; with pain or indifference. One may have been abandoned, or one may have found oneself ceasing to desire. A man of honour will do all in his power for the woman who has been dear to him; who may still be dear. Affection and trust may still be there, though passion has burned itself away.”
“That must fill your time,” Giles muttered, “pretty considerably.”
“Ah, it might”—if monsieur de Maubert felt the dryness of the young man’s tone he did not stoop to any retaliation; he was all kindliness—“but charming women are rarely in need of consolation. Is not the fact you will not face, my idealistic young friend, the fact, simply, that passion, the flame, does burn out? That is a law of life. You will not alter it with all your ascetic moralities. And shall we turn from the flame, its ardour and beauty, because it cannot burn for ever? That would be an anchorite’s error. Let us burn with it and rejoice, until it sinks. Unfortunately, the time of renewal passes,” monsieur de Maubert sighed. “Spring goes, and Summer goes, and even of Autumn there is little left. Winter approaches and one grows old.”
Giles sat silent looking out to sea. The things he held to be of infinite value were invisible to monsieur de Maubert. The things monsieur de Maubert held to be of value were clearly visible to him. He saw the beauty of flame and fountain and the old paganism in his human heart echoed to the thought of love the passion. But he saw something else, that underlay them all, not contradicting, as monsieur de Maubert imagined, but completing them. What that something was it would be useless to describe. If one had come to life asking only of each moment what it gave and never what it meant, one became blinded to the meaning.
Sadness fell between them sitting there, and presently monsieur de Maubert said, showing that he felt it, “Well, the sun is setting; I will go in. You are sorry for me and I am sorry for you.—Do we terminate our discussion in a mutual sympathy?”
He had risen from his chair with a rather porpoise-like roll of his stout white body and stood, complete, assured, benevolent, looking down at Giles; and Giles wondered, looking up at him, whether the price one paid for such completeness was just that blindness.
“I suppose there is sympathy,” he vaguely murmured. “I’m afraid it’s true, though. I think you quite as wrong as you think me.”
“Ah, when you are as old as I am,” said monsieur de Maubert, unperturbed, “you will think differently. You will by then, assuredly, intelligent as you are, have learned to make a better use of your time. You will have learned to round out your life by a richer experience.”
Giles, too, had risen, and he could almost have laughed as he listened; it struck him as so comic, with its sadness, that the traditional rôles of youth and age should be thus reversed. “You will have learned,” monsieur de Maubert was going on, “to accept the full gamut of our human nature. There remains nothing, nothing, for the anchorite in his desert—let me assure you of it—but the handful of sand his dying hand clutches at. He has had, you will say, his mirage with which to console himself. That is a sorry consolation at the end. Accept reality, my young friend. Accept the full gamut. Neglect none of the strings of your violin. It is broken all too soon. And what more sad than to have stopped your ears against its sweetest melody?”
“What, indeed?” said Giles. There was hardly irony in his voice. It was contemplative rather. And smiling at monsieur de Maubert as they stood there in the sunset, he added: “We want different things.” That simile of the unheard melody summed it up.
It was strange to meet them all again that evening, so unchanged to their own consciousness, so changed to his. Strange to find them still so charming and so to shrink from their charm. They came laughing up the steps of the verandah where he still sat, and he wondered if they felt in his voice and look, as he greeted them, any difference.
“Ah, it was an excellent set,” André de Valenbois said, laying down his racquet and seating himself next to Giles. “Where did you disappear to,mon ami? We looked, and you were in the chalet, and when we looked again, you were gone.”
“I felt I’d like a walk. I went up the hill behind the chalet,” said Giles. “The country is lovely up there.”
Madame Vervier’s eyes were on him, hardly cogitative in their gaze, yet perhaps conjecturing something. She, doubtless, knew the names of the ladies of the chalet as well as they knew hers. She might infer the reasons for his flight. At all events, saying nothing, only maintaining her cool dim smile, she crossed the verandah and went into the house.
The evening meal at Les Chardonnerets was irregular in its hour and informal in its habit. Monsieur de Maubert and André de Valenbois only changed their flannels for light afternoon clothes, and Jules, when he came, did not change at all. Giles maintained his custom of evening dress, but he waited for some time alone in the drawing-room that evening, and even after André had joined him, exquisite in pale blues and greys, another five minutes passed before madame Vervier and Alix appeared.
Madame Vervier wore a dark silk dress, purple or red or russet—Giles in the waning light could not define the tint—fastening at the breast with a great old clasp of wrought gold. A fringed Empire scarf, purple, silver, and rose, fell about her beautiful bare arms; a high Empire comb was in her hair, and with her dark gaze she made Giles think of a lady drawn by Ingres.
She moved across to the window, her arm around Alix, and said, standing there and looking out: “La belle soirée!” It was a citron and ash sky above a golden sea.
“Maman, you will sing this evening,” said Alix. “Giles has not heard you sing.”
“Monsieur de Valenbois is the singer. I have no voice,” said madame Vervier.
“One needs no voice to sing the songs I mean,” said Alix. “Do you know our old songs of France, Giles?”
She looked round at him over her shoulder, palely shining in the white taffeta, and Giles, with a sinking and sickening as of an unimaginable yet palpable apprehension, saw that André de Valenbois’ appreciative eyes were upon her; upon her, rather than upon her lovely mother.
“Do you know the one beginning, ‘L’Amour de moi’ ” asked Alix.
Giles said he did not.
“Ah, it is the very dawn of loveliness, that song,” said André, and in the words Giles felt the expression of a perhaps subconscious train of thought. “It is so young. It is all dew and candour. You must hear it, monsieur Giles.” The young Frenchman wandered about the room, his hands in his pockets. “Of the time of your Chaucer,” he went on. “Our countries then had much the same heart. It was the time when our great cathedrals rose and miracles were as plentiful as turtle-doves.” He paused before the mantelpiece and took up one of the photographs set there. “This is of you, mademoiselle Alix?”
Madame Vervier had turned from the window, and, still holding Alix, she approached him.
“Yes; it is of me. It was taken in England,” said Alix.
Giles had not noticed the photograph, but he noticed a change in Alix’s voice. He, too, drew near, and saw the little snap-shot of Alix with the dogs at the edge of the birch-wood. But it was in a frame delicately embroidered in blue and silver, and he asked in all innocence, “Where did the pretty frame come from, Alix?”
“Toppie made it,” said Alix. The alteration in her voice was now evident. He now knew why, and fell to instant silence.
“Toppie? What is Toppie?” André de Valenbois asked, laughing a little and looking at Alix over her photograph. “That is a name I have never heard before.”
“It isle petit nomof mademoiselle Enid Westmacott,” said madame Vervier, in tones sad and gentle. “She was thefiancéeof monsieur Giles’s brother, our friend, killed in battle, of whom you have often heard me speak. Mademoiselle Toppie”—how strangely the childish syllables fell from her untroubled lips—“made the little frame for me as a Christmas gift. Had you not seen it, monsieur Giles? It is exquisite. I was infinitely touched by her thought of me.”
“Ah. It is, indeed, exquisite,” André murmured, while Giles found no words. “One feels that only an exquisite person could have made it.—Yes, certainly I have heard you speak of monsieur Giles’s brother,chère madame. But I did not know that he was betrothed.”
He spoke in a respectful tone, holding the frame, but for all his resource and grace of bearing, filled, Giles suddenly felt, with a conflict of thoughts. Did he know of Owen? Did he accept his place, in the succession? Was he jealous in retrospect; or, like monsieur de Maubert, in retrospectcomplaisant? And that there was something to be kept up—or was it for him, Giles, that she kept it up?—was manifest to him from the deliberate adequacy with which madame Vervier advanced to meet the occasion, while Alix, her eyes turned away from them all, fixed her gaze upon the sky.
“She is, indeed, exquisite. I can say it, monsieur Giles, although I have never met her. It is not only from Alix’s letters that I know her. Before that. Your brother talked of her always. She was always in his thoughts. One could not know him well, or care for him as we did, without coming to know and care for his beautiful Toppie. It was a great devotion,” said madame Vervier, and her voice, in its sadness, sweetness, and decorum, seemed to lay a votive offering before Toppie and her bereavement. “I have never known a greater.” But as she thus offered her wreath and bowed her head, Giles saw a deep colour rise slowly in Alix’s averted face.
“And here is monsieur de Maubert,” said madame Vervier, turning to greet the latest entry. “Jules evidently is belated in some distant village. We will wait no longer, I think. Albertine’s soup will be spoiled.”
“Have you not a picture of this lovely mademoiselle Toppie?” Giles heard André say to Alix as they moved to the dining-room, madame Vervier leading the way on monsieur de Maubert’s arm.
“No, I have no picture of her,” said Alix.
“You know her well?”
“Very well. She lives near Mr. Bradley’s family.”
If madame Vervier’s voice showed full adequacy, so did her child’s. Alix’s adequacy, her grave courtesy, untinged by withdrawal, yet setting a barrier, filled Giles’s thoughts during the meal. She, too, knew just what she wanted to say and just how to say it; yet how much deeper, he felt sure, was her perturbation than madame Vervier’s. She had seen her mother, before the eyes of her English friend, involve herself in a web of implicit falsehood. How false was madame Vervier’s web Alix could not know; but she had known enough to feel ashamed before him; not, Giles knew, because Maman lied; but because she had need of lies. She herself had also lied. Giles, on their journey, had seen Toppie’s photograph in her dressing-case. She had lied because she wished to remove Toppie, as well as herself, from even an indirect intimacy with André de Valenbois. It was as though some deep instinct warned her against him. And though Giles again deplored her readiness, he could not feel that he regretted it.
She sat opposite him, all silvery in the soft candle-light, her young downcast face set in its narrow frame of hair, and he knew that grief and fear were in her heart. Madame Vervier talked much, for her, and her gaze, turned once or twice on her child, seemed, as was its wont, to include her and to carry her on to further depths of contemplation. But even madame Vervier could not guess what was in Alix’s heart.
After supper they all went out on the verandah. The vines fluttered against a moonlit sky and moonlight washed in upon them like a silvery tide. Mademoiselle Blanche, wrapped in swansdown, came gliding in, and Jules, with a pipe, emerged from the shadows and sat in his accustomed place on the steps. Giles felt that it soothed the lacerated heart of the young artist to be with madame Vervier. Like a wounded wild animal, he drew near the hand he trusted. She was capable of compassion; of great gentleness; of most disinterested friendship. An enigma to Giles, there she sat, and her soft, meditative alto joined in the old songs they all sang together, while Alix, behind her in the shadow, leaned her head, as if weary, upon her shoulder and listened. But more than weariness was expressed in the child’s attitude. Giles, listening to the dove-like tenderness of “L’Amour de moi,” divined it all. Alix sought comfort from the pressure of new apprehensions, new intuitions, new complexities; and more than for herself, it was for Maman that she thus drew near. The very love, tender, devout, brooding, of the song, was in the gesture with which she laid her head beside her mother’s and looked out across her breast into the unknown future.