"Helen's temper again!" exclaimed Mrs. Sanford to her husband, after Helen's outburst.
"Sometimes I do not wonder that Helen has a temper," said the vicar.
"But when a girl is as plain as she is, really it is the one thing she should avoid," persisted his wife.
"Yes, I suppose it is bad policy, when Henriette has all the good looks and the money," he replied.
Helen had now turned toward them and Phil and Henriette were going through the gateway. Mrs. Sanford drew a deep breath as one will who is about to undertake a duty and means to approach it softly.
"Did you give up your idea of becoming a nurse, Helen?" she asked casually.
It drew another flash from Helen's eyes, accompanied by a shudder of repugnance.
"I couldn't. I don't like the horror of it—seeing people cut up and everything! I knew I ought to and mother thinks I ought to; but I've delayed because I—— Oh, I know what you're thinking!" She stopped and shook several rebellious strands of hair free with a sudden movement of her head.
Gentle Mrs. Sanford let her hands drop into her lap, lowering her head in the relief of one who has tried and failed.
"Sorry!" Helen's attitude had quite changed. She kissed her aunt on the cheek. "I have an awful temper, haven't I?" Her change of mood had been reflected by her irregular features with singular expressiveness. "I was going to arrange the flowers for the table for our seventeenth cousin and also—do you think cook would let me?—try my hand at the American shortcake thing. I learned how to cook from Jacqueline. I'd rather be a cook than a nurse, if worse comes to worse. Cooks get very good pay."
"Helen! Shocking!" exclaimed Mrs. Sanford. Many gentlewomen were nurses. "You'll have to bargain with cook about the shortcake," she added.
"Didn't his mother make it back in Massachusetts? Why not Helen of Mervaux, if not Helen of Troy, in Hampshire? Cry Harry, England and St. George! In the name ofLiberté, Egalité, Fraternité, allons!"
She was off to the kitchen, whose monarch said, in language of her own, that the way to eat strawberries was with their stems on and dipping them in sugar, or else as jam. In either case they had no relation to cake, and she was not taking cooking lessons from foreign countries.
"In other words, 'it's not done,' oh, England!" said Helen.
"Whatever you mean by that," began cook.
"It should be on British coats-of-arms instead ofDieu et mon Droit," Helen explained, without in the least explaining to cook. "I mean, I take the responsibility off your shoulders. If the American is poisoned I go to the gallows."
"Oh, very well!" agreed cook, as if convinced that a fatal result was inevitable but satisfied if her alibi were safely established.
Helen went to the task with a confident hand, while cook looked on with the same scorn that she would have regarded the introduction ofpoior birds' nest soup into that loyal British household. Her task well under way, Helen returned to the garden to pick flowers for the table, the while humming French songs. She had finished with the flowers when Mrs. Sanford entered the dining-room to find her with her fingers outspread on the cloth, resting half her weight on them and looking at one of the family portraits on the wall.
"Still in love with your ancestor, Helen?" asked her aunt.
Helen was startled back from the seventeenth to the twentieth century.
"Yes. I'm coming in here after dark and teach him to fall in love with me. He's the only man who ever will. Being three hundred years old he might take me because of my youth."
"My dear, where do you get all your strange ideas?"
"I wonder if he would like the strawberry shortcake thing?" Helen continued. "I'm sure he liked rum and took snuff and swore. And you'll please not to tell the seventeenth cousin that I made the cake. I take no risks."
The ring of her laugh remained in the room after she had returned to the kitchen. Helen was never more puzzling to her aunt than when she laughed; for then she was most French, and Mrs. Sanford ascribed much in Helen to Gallic inheritance.
"Poor dear!" thought her aunt. She was always thinking "Poor dear!" but she seldom gave voice to it—not in Helen's presence. It was the sure match to her temper. She would not bear to be "poor deared," as she called it, even by Henriette. Now Mrs. Sanford herself was regarding the portrait intently, and her husband entering joined her in its study.
"You see the likeness, too?" she asked, with a thrill of pride.
"The moment he alighted at the station. We'll seat him under it at dinner—a plot!" said the vicar, smiling, and he caught her hand in his in a way that would have been pleasant to an observer. But if there had been an observer it would not have happened.
Voices were heard on the lawn and they looked out to see Phil and Henriette returning. His American accent which had sounded strange at first grew attractive to Mrs. Sanford. She herself showed him to his room to make sure that everything was right. The hot water "can," as he would have called it, was standing in the wash basin covered with a towel to retain the heat. His bag was unpacked and his toilet articles were laid out.
"The maids do that for you in England?" he said.
"Don't yours?" she inquired.
"Not Jane in a thousand years. She would regard me as a mollycoddle if I permitted it. Sometimes they do it in country houses which are as big as hotels on the hills outside Longfield."
"Strange!" she murmured.
"And I am to put my shoes, I mean my boots, outside the door at night?" he asked.
She was not quite certain of herself, being apprehensive of some American joke back of the question.
"Of course," she said.
"I'll try, though it is going to give my Puritan conscience a twinge," he said drily. "I'll try if you will not tell Jane when you come to visit us in America. Whatever happens, I mean never to lose my standing with Jane."
She laughed without understanding why, except that she was liking this frank American cousin better and better. Indeed, the glow of a new emotion, sounding through years which had had their omnipresent sadness, had possessed her since she had looked at the portrait in the dining-room. The cheer of it was in her voice as she called outside Henriette's door to know if she needed anything; and then after she had passed Helen's door she remembered Helen and called to her also.
Henriette made a leisurely business of her toilet before the mirror. Why shouldn't she? It was merely a fit expression of sincere gratitude for nature's kindness. She might enjoy the grace of the movement of her fingers in caressing expertness around the face that she saw as she arranged her hair.
Helen come up from the kitchen with a blistered finger and her cheeks hot from the oven heat, saw that same face looking back at her. Often she had wished for some magic that would show a new one. Plain people, she thought, ought at least to have a change of plain faces for variety's sake. If others were as tired of her own as she was, she wondered how anybody on earth could look at it except as a punishment.
As long as she knew that her face was clean, why should she pay any attention to it? She might have made more of her hair, which fell below her waist in abundant glory; but if she took pains with it she had that face in front of her during the process. So she ever gave her hair a hurried doing in order to escape enforced companionship with her features. To-night they insisted on a prolonged glance of attention. She made a grimace which was reflected back, and then she laughed at the reflection, making light of her self-consciousness, only to become more self-conscious and blushing, as if caught in a secret. For she saw that she was at her best when she laughed. Then her mobile features, including the lumpy nose, made harmony with the beaming mischief of her eyes and the gleam of her regular teeth.
"If I wore a mask over my nose and a perpetual grin I might be an advertisement for a dentist, at least!" she thought, only to purse out her lips in a "Poof!" as she turned away from the mirror. Then a sigh, whose prolongation apprised her of its existence and brought a shrug of disgust. The next impulse turned her to some charcoal drawings on the table—her own offspring. She loved them, punished them, disowned them at intervals. Now she took up one after the other, critically turning her head, wrinkling her brow, grumbling under her breath, and even sticking out her tongue in indecorous fashion at her own handiwork.
"I never can!" she cried. "I'm no good! Oh, cusses!"
So long was she preoccupied with the inspection, oblivious of seventeenth cousins and the strawberry shortcake thing, that she had to "jump" into her gown when the gong sounded, which was no new thing for her. It was not much of a gown. That being the case, why not jump into it? If it appeared to be thrown on it would be more harmonious with her style of beauty. What did it matter, anyway, when the harder you tried to draw the worse you drew?
The gown which Henriette wore was a good deal of a gown, as even the eye of the man who grasps effects (which are all that he is meant to grasp) and not the details which make the effects might see. Its simplicity, perhaps, made it as suitable for dinner at the vicarage as at a more pretentious board. Experts who charge more for their talents than for the material they use had fashioned it to make the most of Henriette, a delightful task because she supplied talent with such a good start. However, she was not satisfied with the gown after her inspection of it before the mirror, though possibly better pleased when she saw its effect on the seventeenth cousin.
Mrs. Sanford had seated Philip under the portrait across from Helen. When Henriette was seated at his side, the gown which had set off her figure so attractively as she entered the room became only the vase from which rose the flower of her white shoulders and the white column of neck supporting the small head. She did not appear to direct the talk, yet it seemed only natural that she should be its creative spirit. Mostly it was between the two. The vicar and his wife were glad enough to listen and to exchange glance after glance at the portrait behind Phil's chair. Henriette frequently spoke of "we," which meant herself and Helen, as if they were inseparable; and if Helen spoke it was in answer to some reference which her sister made to her.
"I am the talker, you see," she said, "and Helen is the wise one."
"If I keep still," Helen interjected, "and let Henriette say that I'm wise, she is so convincing that lots of people think that I really am."
Phil was not the first traveller who hardly realised that he was having a meal at the same time that he sat next to a pretty girl at dinner. An exclamation from the others first apprised him that the strawberry shortcake thing had arrived. By all external criteria it might have come from the kitchen at Longfield. The main body was properly accompanied by a satellite bowl of crushed berries.
"You cut it," said Helen to Phil.
He did as bidden.
"Now!"
He tasted it with judicial care.
"Amazing!" he declared. "Let no one say that England's insularity means lack of adaptability. Next to my mother's, it is the best I've ever eaten. I must give my compliments to the cook."
"I will for you," put in Helen.
"But the object is proselytisation," said Phil. "I wait on the opinion of others."
The vicar took a mouthful and then another; his wife followed the same process; and—well, they both had second helpings. The strawberry shortcake thing had won no less a victory at Truckleford than had Virginia ham.
"It wasn't the taxation without representation on Virginia ham and shortcake that led to your Declaration of Independence, was it?" the vicar asked jocularly.
"No, that was tea," Phil replied. "Afterwards we became a nation of coffee drinkers, further to prove our independence."
"When you come to Mervaux," Henriette said, "Jacqueline will make you forest strawberry tartlets as only a French cook can and omelets so light that they have to be weighed down lest they fly out of the window when they are brought to table. We're all for art at Mervaux."
She again had the monopoly of his attention.
"Do you allow spectators?" he asked. "May I lie on the grass and watch you paint, or shall I be required to pull up trees and rearrange the landscape?"
"It depends. I——" she murmured thoughtfully as she stirred her coffee.
Helen did not hear what they were saying. If they were preoccupied with each other, she was preoccupied with the portrait. The living face underneath the frame was in the same pose as its prototype. Phil's unconsciousness of what was so apparent to other eyes gave dramatic point to the situation. At last she could restrain herself no longer. She cut into Henriette's sentence with her outcry:
"Look! You must look!"
For him there was a sudden transition from a concentration of attention on Henriette to Helen's eyes, flaming with intensity, not lacking in mischief, as she leaned across the table.
"Where?" he asked.
"I didn't mean to shout as if there were an alarm of fire. Look at the portrait behind you!"
He turned and under the lettering of "General Thomas Sanford" he saw a clear-cut, positive face, lean, with a humorous curve to the mouth and eyes surveying the world with ready candour. When he turned back he was conscious of a silence and that all were watching him.
"Don't you see it?" asked Helen, speaking what was in the mind of the others.
"The portrait, yes. What has happened to it?" he asked. He was a little wary of something lurking in the eyes of the plain girl opposite him. They seemed to have unexplored depths. If she were having some joke on him he would feel his way, this stranger in foreign climes, and leave the next move to her.
"Of course you don't," she said. "Wait! Everybody wait!" She was gone on the errand of her impulse.
"You never know quite what Helen is going to do next," Henriette explained.
"Her French blood," murmured Mrs. Sanford.
Helen returned bearing a mirror which she had taken from above her washstand.
"Of course you didn't see it. They say that if one met his double in the street he would be the last to recognise it," she told Phil, as she held the mirror at such an angle that both General Thomas Sanford's face and his own were reflected.
Phil drew back startled after a first glance, to look into Helen's eyes expressive of her intense enjoyment of the situation; and then irresistibly he looked again in the mirror. Two and a half centuries stood between the two Sanfords. Add thirty years to those of the man sitting at the table and dress him in the same garb as the man in the portrait and it would be difficult to tell them apart. Phil was not more thrilled than confused. And then another face appeared beside his in the mirror. It was Henriette's, peeping in at the edge, her lips parted in a teasing smile.
"Very like, isn't it?" she said softly.
"Yes," he murmured to the reflection; and the reflection was gone, leaving him alone with that of the ancestor.
"The old blood!" exclaimed the vicar, with deep emotion. "His brother was the founder of the American family and your father and you and I are the only male descendants. Wait!" And he left the room.
"Which means that the plot thickens, I suppose," Phil remarked, with an accusing look at Helen.
"Honestly, I'm in the dark about his intentions," she said, still holding the mirror. The humour of the situation suddenly smote her, and she was laughing as she had into that same mirror before dinner. She noted a shade of surprise in his eyes, and realisation that the cause of it was his discovery that when she laughed she did have a certain charm that brought the blood to her cheeks. She had been caught posing—nothing less. The laugh died; not even a smile remained. The lump of nose, the irregular features, the broad mouth—she was her plain, usual self again.
"Go on laughing!" he exclaimed, unconsciously voicing his thought in his surprise. "I mean——" embarrassedly, "it's your joke. I believe your conscience is already troubling you for the trick."
"It is a mirror conscience," she answered, looking back at him soberly; and then, from the infection of surprise in his eyes, a gathering, quizzical smile spread until it broke in another ripple of laughter.
"That is a new kind of conscience, Helen. Explain!" said her sister.
"To you, too, Henriette?" said Helen. "I've only just found it, myself."
"Apparently it is in the backs of mirrors," murmured Henriette.
"I don't blame Henriette for never looking at the back, do you?" Helen asked Phil.
Phil thought a little revenge was due him for having a mirror set in front of him for the purpose of a comparison of physiognomies.
"Hardly. I envy the mirror!" he said, turning to her. But she had dropped her gaze to her coffee cup and took a deliberate sip before looking up.
"It is always pleasant to say foolish things nicely," she remarked.
"But he is sincere. If he weren't it would be accusing him of blindness, wouldn't it, cousin?" put in Helen mischievously.
"Absolutely!" he managed to say, conscious that he was not having much revenge and that things were getting brittle; while Mrs. Sanford, pretending to smile, could not quite follow the nimble conversation.
Helen laughed again to cover the misadventure of her unruly tongue, and Phil laughed, too, though he did not exactly know why. Henriette was taking another deliberate sip of coffee. They were not aware of the vicar's return until he stood behind Phil's chair.
"Look again, cousin!" Helen bade him.
He was of a mind not to, but could not control his curiosity. The vicar was holding against the frame beside the face of the ancestor a photograph of the statue in the square at Longfield.
"Your father sent it to me," he explained.
"Not a double, but a treble!" exclaimed Helen.
"It's the way of the blood," continued the vicar. "It skips generations, but it's always there—early in the seventeenth century, late in the eighteenth, and now early in the twentieth."
"But the one in the eighteenth was a wicked rebel, disloyal to our German king!" Helen put in again, yielding to temptation. "Old Thomas, there, would have disowned him."
"Helen!" admonished her aunt. "It was only a family quarrel."
"But I believe that old Thomas would have been on George Washington's right hand," said Helen. "He looks it."
Meanwhile, Phil was looking at the three faces, so similar that he might well have been in doubt which was his own. If he were expected to rise and make a fitting speech it was beyond his sense of humour.
"Help! help! Too much ancestor!" he cried out; and half rising he seized Helen's hands, pushing the mirror away at the same time that he held her at arms' length. "You began it!"
She was flushing to the roots of her hair. How strong he was! How silly she had been!
"No, the ancestor! Ancestors begin everything for everybody!" she retorted. "And if you will let go of me I will put the mirror away."
"We all beg your pardon for embarrassing you. It was not a plot and we are all very interested," said the vicar, his eyes twinkling.
The photograph of the Revolutionary hero which her uncle laid on the table Helen took up; and the change of subject so earnestly desired by every one she wrought in another impulse.
"What do ancestors count," she said, "beside a piece of work like this! It's the best he ever did and there is not his equal in all this island—nowhere outside of France. It's power—the purity of line! Who wouldn't charge led by such a figure as that!"
"Now, Helen, when you are through with your ecstasy shan't we go out on the lawn?" said her uncle, patting her hand.
The force of her enthusiasm had something compelling which led Phil to look at the photograph over her shoulder as if it were something he had never seen; but upon her uncle's hint he saw a plain, dull face yielding assent and he was conscious of a vitality suddenly turned limp.
Henriette took the photograph from her sister's hand.
"The best thing of his I have seen," she remarked, examining it. "Inspired by his subject. He has just missed the arm, I think. I should like to have a copy. Shall we walk?" she asked Phil, leading the way. "We ought to have a portrait of the seventeenth cousin as well as of the ancestors," she continued. "I may try portraiture again when you come to France. You will find it easier to pose than to tear up trees, for we have some very large trees at Mervaux, I warn you."
"I hope it will not be in profile," he replied.
Wasn't he going to France to see her? Perhaps she understood the intimation, as she pretended to study his face in the light of the doorway.
"I think a full face will be best!" she decided. "What a glorious night!"
Moonlight and the soft air of the English summer time redeem the soggy, rheumatic winters with their overcast days. A carpet of sod cut by the shadows of moon rays which gave lustre to her eyes! In months to come there were to be other evenings equally fine by nature's gentle beneficence, but none like this. There never could be again; for something was coming to the world which would leave nothing in human relations the same.
The cousinly party walked up and down or stopped to chat in changing groups, Henriette and Phil mostly together and Helen sometimes quite by herself. The happiest of all were the vicar and his wife. They were old enough to take happiness in its full measure; to enjoy that of their own years and by reflection that of youth.
"Are you pleased with him?" asked Mrs. Sanford when two white heads, much like the two at their dinner three thousand miles away, rested on their pillows.
"Yes, my dear. I shall write to Dr. Sanford that we claim part of his son. He is our Philip, too."
"Our Philip!" she repeated. "The family does not die out," she said, in relief at some of the weight of an old burden lifted.
"It survives very worthily over the seas," said her husband.
"How beautiful Henriette was to-night. She grows more charming as she matures, though I confess young people of this age puzzle me. I couldn't help thinking what a splendid pair they made. Ah, blood will tell!"
"And Helen grows more temperamental."
"Poor dear! I don't know what will become of her."
With accustomed leisure Henriette had taken off her gown. It had served well that evening. To her delicate sense it was a living thing, a servant subject to praise and reproach. Caressingly she laid it aside. The buckles of her slippers smiled at her, and she held the foot which she withdrew arched and turned it for inspection before thrusting it into the softer slipper fitted to enjoy the bare intimacy of such a small foot. Still more leisurely she undid her hair and brushed it, conscious that the picture in the frame before her was the same that she had momentarily set in the mirror beside a seventeenth cousin's at table.
Helen—poor dear!—hung up her gown carefully enough, though with no more interest than if it were a towel; and she kicked first one of her slippers almost ceiling high and caught it and then the other, in enjoyment of an old trick of hers. Mirrors were of no use to her in undoing and brushing her hair; yet as she laid the brush back on the table she had a glimpse of herself and it was the smiling self. She laughed at that self, only to find that it was less plain-looking than the smiling self; and then she was angry. The mirror conscience stabbed her with the thought that she was posing, trying to be attractive.
"He must have fancied that I was flirting!" she mused. "I flirt with anybody!"
When she went to bed it was to toss and think of many things, consequent and inconsequent, and of no one thing for long, and when she found herself sobbing she turned on the light and took up her charcoals. But they seemed crude and self-accusing, and she turned to drawing pictures out of her fancy, which at last made her eyelids heavy as it had on many other occasions.
When Helen came down to breakfast she was wan and years older in appearance than Henriette, who was blooming and cheerful.
"Working again! Confess—I saw the light in your room," said Henriette. "You try too hard."
"There's no doubt of it," agreed Helen. "I can't help it. It's the fault of mistaking taste for talent in moments of impulse, and some kind of a knot in my brain."
"Poor dear!" said Mrs. Sanford in instinctive sympathy before she could catch herself. Then she drew back in her chair, prepared for the tempest.
But this time Helen did not appear even irritated; she had become more than ever inexplicable to her aunt.
"Poor dear!" she repeated absently. "If one talks about one's self one must expect to be talked about."
The vicar turned to Phil's experiences in the Southwest. Was it really wild? And how did one live? As Phil pictured his life in swift, broad strokes, Helen was listening intently and some of the fire returned to her eyes.
"There is one thing I have not told," he said gravely, as they went out on the lawn. "I think that it ought to be told even in the presence of the ancestor, though he may disown me."
"More American humour," thought Mrs. Sanford, convinced that she now knew the signals and prepared to laugh even if she did not understand the joke.
"My first task was cleaning out cattle cars!"
But Mrs. Sanford did not laugh. She was aghast. Even the vicar was visibly shocked. Helen spoke first.
"I hope you did it well," she said.
"No fear!" he rejoined.
"We wondered why you did not go to work for Peter," said the vicar.
They, too, knew of Peter Smithers. Even in England Philip could not escape the shadow of the rich man who might leave him a fortune, which Mrs. Sanford had already imagined as restoring the estate in Hampshire. Perhaps Phil guessed as much, for he related with relish the essence of his last interview with Peter. The vicar and his wife looked depressed; they longed to tell him that he had been unwise.
Helen was laughing as she had last night into the mirror, at the picture which she conjured of Peter stamping down the path at Longfield in anger.
"Splendid!" she exclaimed, almost hilariously; and then was still, as their eyes met.
"You'll make your own fortune, which is better," said Henriette.
"A hundred a week is all there is in sight at present," Phil replied.
"We have little time before the train goes if——" the vicar urged.
It was the ancestors again. The warrior of the portrait had the cool and damp distinction of having his bones under a stone in the church floor which had been trod by generations of worshippers. Later cousins were in the churchyard, their chiselled names grown faint. The vicar's kindly face glowed as he indulged in his favourite topic of genealogy. Helen imagined the ancestors in the garbs and prejudices of their time come to life and passing in review before the transplanted and surviving branch.
"I suppose," she suggested, in the way she had of speaking aloud to herself, as if the thought were not worth considering by other people but pleased her, "I suppose that Peter Smithers would say that these are all dead ones and it's the live ones that count."
Of course she should not make such remarks. Still, she would and people would stare at her in wonder, even as the vicar and his wife were staring at that moment. Phil looking hard at a tombstone had a quiver to his lips which he would have denied bore any relation to a smile.
"I was only thinking how much nicer it must be to be alive and touring Europe for the first time with the money you had earned, instead of being an ancestor," she explained. "I like Peter for giving his money to the clubhouse. Ancestors did nothing for him."
"You don't seem to care for ancestors?" Phil suggested.
"Oh, yes, lots—generically," she answered. "They built cathedrals and churches like this and had a horrid good old human time in the doing of it. As for one's own ancestors, it depends upon how much they have done for you."
"You are quite surpassing yourself at iconoclasm to-day," said her sister gently and sympathetically.
Helen nodded as if she knew it, and could not help herself.
"Everything depends upon the flavour of the grapes," she replied. The sisters were searching each other's eyes in a new and surprising way to both. The grapes were sweet to Henriette; they were sour to Helen.
"It is the hard work last night," said Henriette, slipping her arm around her sister. "Those charcoals may come right yet."
Helen was silent, unresisting, unresponsive, her face like ill-moulded clay, and Henriette a personification of apology to Phil.
"According to story-books, Peter may yet fall on his knees and beg you to take his fortune," she added to Phil. "So much for Peter Smithers. He doesn't worry you, does he? It's delightful having seventeenth cousins like you."
"And like you!" he replied to the challenge. "And you will not let me miss the train."
They had time to walk and his bag had already gone. Helen was subdued, remaining with her uncle behind Phil and Henriette.
"Remember at Mervaux, the sixth of August!" Henriette called from the platform.
"I await your mother's invitation," Phil replied.
His last view of her was the uplifted arm as she waved her handkerchief. Of course he had said that he would return to Truckleford now that he had found the way and the vicar even talked of accepting the invitation to Longfield, which is the way of such partings. But America is far away.
Philip was alone in the compartment, very much alone as pictures recollected from the down journey passed before his mind. The glance across the aisle at the first meeting; Henriette's face reflected in the mirror beside his; her figure preceding him along the path as they ascended the hill above the village; little confidences on the walk to the station. These are well-known symptoms. Acting as his own diagnostician, this modern youth only four weeks from the cactus country thought:
"I wonder if I have been hit! And Helen? I don't quite make her out. She's not uninteresting, though. I wonder how long it will take Henriette to do a portrait! I hope she is one of those painstaking artists who has intervals of rest and conversation. But maybe Madame Ribot won't write to me," scepticism which he dismissed as unpleasant. It stood to reason that the mother of such a girl as Henriette would do anything that she wanted. "I should, myself," he decided.
To him as an American the assassination of the heir to a European throne and his consort, which he read in the newspapers that evening, had the thrill of horror of a railroad or a steamship disaster. It could have none of the seriousness that it had to every European, who had that "balance of power," as they called it, in the back of the head of his individual existence. He read; he sympathised in a generic twinge of pity, and was little further concerned. In the afternoon of the next day he should be in Holland and in the evening, had he not chosen to spend a few days with Rembrandt and wooden shoes, he could have been in Berlin, a journey in distance equivalent to that from Buffalo to New York or Chicago to Omaha.
What contrast in language and people! Miss Wooden Shoes was as boyhood pictures made her: and leisurely England, too; but where was the phlegmatic old German with his china-bowl pipe? He realised the energy of the new Germany, galvanised by some higher will of leadership, with the resentment of itsverbotensystem which is inevitable to all Americans who have not been educated in Germany and themselves fallen into step, and particularly to a Sanford of New England.
He met Americans wherever he went, in hotels, on trains, and in picture galleries, catered to for the dollars they dropped by the way into open palms, privately criticised for the very liberality which made them welcome, not to mention also for their brusqueness, their air of success and sometimes their spread-eagleism. But they did not care as long as they had the freedom of the playground. European politics or world politics did not concern them, come from the fatness of their new world beyond the seas. The last tourist summer of its kind!
Philip studied the newspapers with the help of college German which is good enough on grammar but floundering in passing the time of day. His keen mind began to catch the sense of how an assassination affected that balance of power; he felt the pressure in the air before a cloud burst; the suspense of the sparks running along the fuse from Sarajevo to the powder magazines—but all objectively, with no presage of how subjective it was to become to him.
Then one day all the youth of that nation moved as with one thought and purpose, as the football eleven goes onto the gridiron—which was the simple comparison that he made. For forty years they had been drilling for this struggle and all the years and days and hours of the forty years broke in cumulative force for the blow. How it made him think; that a people could act together in this fashion; that a million and two million men could go each to his place as the fireman to his on an alarm! It seemed as if they should sweep all the world before them, like the breaking of a dam down a river bed.
Youth was not bothering how to get home. It was on the scene and that was enough. But about Mervaux and seventeenth cousins? Should he see either? While in Berlin he had received so insistent a letter of invitation from Madame Ribot that he had decided to spend less time in Paris and more in Mervaux than originally planned, if it were agreeable.
Somehow he got on board a train in Switzerland, and sitting up all night in a stifling second-class compartment he reached Paris. His fellow-passengers were thinking of how to obtain money on letters of credit and how to find berths on a transatlantic steamer. His own passage had already been engaged on a French ship from Havre.
In Paris was a man who was more important to Phil than kings and generals. The manager of the corporation which had promoted him and paid the wage that gave him the holiday had just arrived from Vichy by automobile. Mr. Ledyard was in a state of mind! The credit of the world thrown out of gear; no answers to his cablegrams; stock markets closed, while the passage he had engaged from Boulogne on a German steamer was of about as much use to him for crossing the Atlantic as a team of Esquimaux dogs. When Phil entered the room Ledyard had been ringing in vain for a servant, who was already with the colours. He was glad of some one to talk to, this man of power whom Phil had met only twice: once on being employed and again on his return from the Southwest to promotion.
"Business will go to the devil!" said Ledyard. "Everybody is going to draw in and wait to see whether or not the world is coming to an end. I'd like to drive the Kaiser's war bonnet down over his head and strangle him. I confess that I never felt so helpless in my life. I can't even get a second-class passage. Steamship company paid no attention to my wires. First come, first served."
"I have a passage on a French liner for the sixteenth," said Phil, "two in the cabin, if it will be any use to you, sir."
"Will it be any use? Taken, if it's six in the cabin," said Mr. Ledyard. "And you return when you can get a comfortable passage; your salary goes on." He considered the favour worth Phil's salary for years. "I shouldn't stay in Paris if I were you," he went on. "You might be caught in a siege. These people can't hold the Germans. Manufacturing power and efficiency will be the big factors in this war, and the Germans are ready. You have seen that, haven't you?"
"Yes. Amazing—it's a lesson."
"My English friends won't see Germany; they live too close to her. But an American ought to, even if he resents her. It's between the Germans and the British navy. The French can't stand up to it. I only wish they could."
Phil could not agree. It was a different atmosphere which he had found in Paris from that in Berlin, but no less impressive. Here was the wall to hold the battering-ram which he had seen in movement for the shock on the other side of the frontier. The emotional French were going silently to their places no less promptly than the Germans; democracy against Kaiserdom, the closed shops with "Sous le drapeau" chalked on the shutters, the quietness of prayer and resolution which possessed all France as one human being had taken possession of him.
All the world at war, and he was walking down the Champs-Élysées, the greatest street in the world, its pavement white in the moonlight and silent except for an occasional footfall. Somewhere over the hills in the direction of Rheims was Mervaux. If the Ribots were still there and wanted him, he would pay them at least a call.
The trace of American blood in Madame Ribot's veins was only an echo, yet its presence kept her from being entirely European. She had never visited America; even her English had more than a touch of French accent. America was vast, distant, noisy, and little concerned her. Nothing much concerned her except her comfort. Her small, shrewd eyes served the ends of a sluggish disposition. In girlhood they had not kept her from being beautiful and in middle age they sat guardian over her health and the business of preserving the freshness of features which were strikingly like Henriette's.
Her phlegm, if phlegm it were, was reaction from days when she had enjoyed Monte Carlo no less than Paris. They were days that she never mentioned. Possibly they had brought prematurely the wrinkles which, in a later phase, she massaged as unpleasant landmarks. She fought to retain youth, while reliving it in Henriette.
M. Ribot, who was in the Argentine, belonged to the past, and the income dating back to an arrangement between lawyers came regularly from a lawyer and would come till her death or till she married again. There had been a grandfather who lived in a villa overlooking the Mediterranean. He had been fond of Henriette and said that his son, Henriette's father, was a fool and a blackguard and his daughter-in-law was a lucky, selfish, spoiled child. When he died he left Henriette an independent fortune.
The rest was wrapped in mystery and eccentricity, with Helen a sort of appendage. She and Henriette indistinctly remembered a quarrel between their parents in an apartment in Paris, which they overheard from an adjoining room without knowing what it meant. Later, the grandfather came and the father went away, without Madame seeming to mind his going. Helen did remember her mother saying to the father:
"You may have Helen, if you wish, but I shall keep Henriette;" and the grandfather added: "Yes, she stays in France. I shall stay in France, myself."
As the father would not have plain little Helen, the mother kept her. After her separation from her husband, Madame Ribot settled in the chateau at Mervaux and Henriette's money maintained a small apartment in Paris, where the family went in winter that Henriette might study painting; for all agreed that she had talent.
Helen wandered in the fields and talked to the peasants and kept on trying to draw. Her only lessons were from an old artist who had become interested in her when she was fifteen. His technique was excellent. He knew how, but he could not do it, as he said.
"You keep on drawing and drawing," were his last words, "and don't bother if any one thinks you an ugly duckling."
She did not mind the old artist calling her an ugly duckling. These two believed in the truth, the truth of art. No one had ever seen so much of the charm of her smile as he when they walked beside the Seine, went to the Louvre, browsed in old print shops, and he criticised her work, her miserable charcoals, as she called them. When he died Helen felt that she had lost her best friend and she went regularly to put flowers on his grave, smiling the while, even if her eyes were moist, as he who had no friends except her would have wished.
Her smiles were for the byways. She had many for the peasants and the villagers. They liked the strange, moody Helen better than the beautiful, gracious Henriette, and they liked to pose for her. Mère Perigord who sat outside her door crocheting on sunny days had been drawn a score of times by Helen.
"Keep on drawing and drawing!" This was really all of Helen's life. Henriette painted and Madame Ribot massaged her wrinkles, read many novels, took a long time to dress for dinner, a longer time to get up in the morning, and exchanged reminiscent letters with men and women who had belonged to the early period of her life. One might think that she was preparing to marry again, but the peasants and the servants knew better. They had dismissed the gossip over the thought in connection with the Count de la Grange, a neighbour of acceptable age but quite poor, and also in connection with General Rousseau, a major in the war of '70, another neighbour who was fairly well-to-do.
For years the thing had been going on. Almost every day the Count and the General called or came to dinner. Madame Ribot was their social world. They were ever telling her how young she kept; the Count with an indirection which was the most delicate flattery and the General with the brusqueness of a soldier, which had the charm of contrast with the Count's method. The two vying in gallantries of an old-fashioned kind made a situation all to Madame Ribot's taste, as her shrewd eyes turned from one to the other. Imagination and recollection, with the basis of the past to work on, completed her satisfaction.
When she received the letter from Henriette asking her to invite the seventeenth cousin to Mervaux, her characteristic of making much of little by reflection, which was as French as it was innate, enlarged it to a significant event. Thanks to the vicar of Truckleford, she was not uninformed of the statue in the square at Longfield; and she was not without pride in her blood. Her American mother had not been of thenouveaux, and from what Henriette said about Phil she grasped that he was of that breed of American sufficient unto itself, in the pride of a new nationality which does not need the label of nobility as assurance of quality. She could write a gracious letter and it pleased her to take some pains with the invitation to Philip Sanford.
The letter posted, she had a twinge of loneliness. She missed Henriette. Her affection for her daughter was compounded with selfishness. She liked the sight of Henriette at her easel; Henriette in her morning gown; Henriette in dishabille, throat and shoulders bare and her figure worthy of her features. Thus she herself had looked in youth, she knew. If she had only had Henriette's eyes! She was pleased that her daughter had fine eyes, yet almost envied them. Still, Henriette was a part of herself; a flower from her stem; a pleasant reminder of youth which kept her young. As an inheritance Henriette had her mother's gift with men, plus her own gift of art; for it was art that made her different from her mother.
Henriette's letter from Truckleford had made no mention of the thing that Madame Ribot had had most in mind as the object of the girls' visit to the Sanfords. Helen, who had written only once and at other times sent love through Henriette, had not mentioned it, which was more suspicious still. So Madame Ribot wrote directly to Mrs. Sanford, who answered that "Helen was in such a temper at mention of the subject that I did not pursue it."
"The little devil!" exclaimed Madame Ribot.
It was not the first time that she had made such reference to Helen. In the fulness of irritation she started a letter to Helen, peremptory, upbraiding; but did not finish it. The recollection of three days which she had once spent nursing her husband in a hotel room, when they were travelling in Algeria where no nurse could be obtained, rose before her. Besides, anger was wrinkle-making. And what was the use? She tore up the letter and turned from her desk to her manicure set.
Her plan had been for Helen to remain in England and enter a training school for nurses. England was a better place for that sort of thing than France and it meant that Helen would be established quite independently some distance from home and earning her living in an honourable way. Not that she had put the plan as clearly as this to Helen, but she had written it to Mrs. Sanford, trusting to that gentle soul's persuasion to carry it into effect.
"If Helen only had a little grit!" thought Madame Ribot. "Now if it were Henriette——"
Awaiting the girls' return, on the mantelpiece of the dining-room, with a number of letters for Henriette was a letter from Paris for Helen. When she opened it she forgot any twinge of suffering because her mother had kissed Henriette on both cheeks and embraced her, while giving the other daughter a dab on one cheek. Helen was breathing very hard and holding the letter so tight in her fingers that it trembled. She had read it through twice to make quite certain that her eyes were not deceiving her, before her cry of delight made Madame Ribot and Henriette, who was running through her own letters to see which she should open first, turn.
"Oh, it is good—good—good!" she repeated. "M. Vailliant is coming to look at my charcoals to see if I have enough for an exhibition. If I have that means I shall make a lot. You're bound to, everybody says, at one of his exhibitions."
Neither Madame Ribot nor Henriette had spoken. They seemed startled by the violence of her enthusiasm.
"Aren't you glad?" Helen asked, suddenly becoming very still.
"Glad! Who should be glad if not I?" said her mother feelingly.
Henriette slipped her arm around Helen's waist.
"And I, you dear mouse, when you've worked so long and hard! It's a triumph," she said.
Helen nestled her head on her sister's shoulder and drew deep, long breaths, while Madame Ribot took up the letter.
"I don't want you to be too set-up for fear you may be disappointed," she said. "M. Vailliant says if there are enough to be worth while. He is only coming to look over your work."
"Yes—yes," said Helen, sobering. "I had the exhibition already open. Enough and worth while! We'll see—you will help me to decide. I'll bring them all down and we can go through them together. From the way he writes he may come to-day."
She hurried away and returned directly with the first portfolio of the drawings which she had kept—for she had destroyed many in moments of depression—and having laid them on the table went for another and still another.
"I never realised that I had done so many!" she exclaimed, in amazement at the size of the stack.
"Mère Perigord twenty times!" smiled Henriette.
Madame Ribot was appalled by the task, though she had seen and heard so much of Helen's charcoals. She and Henriette stood by perfunctorily, while Helen turned severe critic. None of them seemed good to her, as she thought of how they would look on a wall at an exhibition, with connoisseurs picking them to pieces.
"Oh, cusses! I can't do it! I never can!" she declared. "My fate is to wear a white cap and feed people broth and keep their temperature chart in order!" She slapped one Mère Perigord in the face in disgust.
"Remember," said Henriette, "that charcoal is very limited."
In the midst of the selection a limousine rolled up to the door and a roly-poly little man, with close-cropped beard and eyes as shrewd as Madame Ribot's own, alighted and sent in the card of "M. Vailliant, Art Dealer."
Madame Ribot received him. As he entered the room Henriette was standing by the near side of the table in front of Helen, in whose heart was great fear, any faith she might have had in her charcoals shrivelling in his presence. M. Vailliant bowed to both, his glance swiftly moving about the room as if counting the number of the scattered drawings; but to Henriette, whose beauty dominated her surroundings, he made a particularly low bow.
"Mademoiselle, I see that you are ready for me," he said, with still another bow to Henriette. And Helen felt the shrivelling sensation more deeply.
"Both my daughters are artists, and one paints," said Madame Ribot, with the reflection of pride in the tribute which M. Vailliant had instinctively paid to Henriette, some of whose paintings were on the walls. Indeed, they were everywhere about the chateau. "I am rather fond of this one, myself," she added, nodding toward a landscape which faced the dealer. It had had honourable mention at the Salon, but it had not sold.
Looking from Henriette to the picture and then back at Henriette, the art dealer breathed an "Ah!" in a way that implied that a place in the Salon was the obvious one for Henriette.
"Naturally, I know of your work," he said, with another bow.
"My daughter has never had an exhibition, though she has quite enough pictures now," went on Madame Ribot. "There are others in the next room. Perhaps you would like to see them, too."
Most charming Madame Ribot was when she was interested in any purpose, and she led the way into the room, Henriette meantime standing in the doorway and studying M. Valliant's face. Helen remained beside her pile of charcoals, trying to resist the desire to fly to the fields away from the whole business. She could feel her heart pounding and her temples throbbing. When she had a glimpse of herself in the mirror over the mantelpiece she realised that it was from herself that she particularly wanted to escape.
"Excellent technique," M. Vailliant remarked. "But an exhibition of paintings—that is a great undertaking. One of the big houses will take you up one day and make your vogue. There is no hurry."
"It was mother who was speaking of the exhibition, not I," said Henriette casually. "You came to see my sister's charcoals."
"So I did," agreed the dealer. "Charcoals are more in keeping with the modest pretensions of my establishment. Quick returns and small profits, as they say at the Bon Marché."
"You will stretch a point for her, won't you?" said Henriette, as she drew aside to allow him to return to the other room. "She's worked so hard and it means so much to her."
But Helen had overheard. A dash of red shot into her cheeks, as her shoulders gave a nervous shrug. The dealer looked from the beautiful to the plain girl with that sense of contrast between the two which Helen had felt a thousand times.
"Where do I begin?" he asked, almost perfunctorily.
Some one had told Helen that one should blow one's own trumpet to an art dealer; that many an artist had been started on a career by making the most of his personality. But when she was conscious of how poor her drawings were she could not play the herald of her own skill. As for personality, one must have something to start with.
"Those four I picked out for the least bad," she said, handing them to him.
Not a sign on the dealer's face, as he looked them through, while her temples throbbed.
"More academic than the one I had seen—better drawing, but——" he shook his head.
The throbbing ceased. Helen knew the truth. There would be no exhibition. She felt faint; there was no heart left in her.
"And these?" asked M. Vailliant, looking at a time-coloured board on top of a pile on a chair.
"Discarded. They were too awful—some of them just dashed off for fun."
"Oh!"
M. Vailliant spread his legs as he bent over the pile; he puffed out his lips and sucked them in, his only sign of emotion, as he began separating the drawings into two piles% Then he applied the same process to those on the table, without question or comment. Helen did not know what to make of him. She was dizzy with curiosity and hope. When he was through, still silent like some general over a war-map, this master of artistic fate, who knew that the real master was the public who paid his rent, made a single pile of those which he had chosen.
"And these?" He found he had missed some against the wall behind a portière.
"Oh, cartoons I call them—not a bit worth while!" said Helen. "Caricatures, perhaps. I just did them for the sport of it."
M. Vailliant did not seem to hear her. He went through the cartoons twice, still keeping up that motion of his lips as if he were alternately blowing soap bubbles and sucking in a string.
"Have you ever tried etching?" he asked.
"No. I'd like it, but—I——" gasped Helen.
"I would if I were you," he said, so very matter-of-factly that she was puzzled. "Ever tried painting?"
"I—yes——" she faltered. His shrewd eyes were looking at her sharply.
"Have you anything that you've done?"
"Yes, but it's awful—just splotches of colour. I see colour that way. Shall I get it?" she asked.
"Why not? Let's see the whole shop while we are at it."
Helen ran upstairs, wondering if he were making fun of her. Not one word of praise had he spoken. He had given no sign of enthusiasm. Yet he had asked her if she had ever tried etching and wanted to see this painting which she drew from under a pile of clothes on the cupboard shelf. Well, if the great art dealer had come from Paris to see the whole shop, then he should see it. Let him be amused. She did not care. He could not hurt her feelings; he should not see that she minded when he told her the worst.
"Helen's painting is only for fun," Henriette was explaining to M. Vailliant as they waited for Helen's return. "Please don't be too critical. She is very sensitive."
"Oh, no. I realise that she is not a serious painter like you, Mademoiselle. I thought I should like to see what ideas of colour she had. Why not?" M. Vailliant mused, as he picked out two from the pile of charcoals on the table and laid them on top in a sort of bored, add-six-and-multiply-by-four manner.
When Helen returned with her painting, a little thing of a wet shepherd and his dog in a burst of soft, apologetic sunlight through the mist, he took it from her with a casual nod and having set it on the mantelpiece stepped slowly backward and resumed his lip-movements, which he interrupted long enough to ask Helen if she had had any lessons in painting.
"I've only watched Henriette and taken some of her colours and splotched, as I call it," she replied almost defiantly.
But he only muttered, "Impressionistic!" between his puffs and suckings.
"Yes, that is what I should say!" put in Henriette.
"I know it!" exclaimed Helen, with an abruptness that startled him out of his mannerism into an intense glance at her. She was laughing, her chin up, the regular teeth showing in a white line. If ever eyes had invited any critic to shoot his sharpest darts they were hers. "And the exhibition?" she demanded. "Shall we hold it in the Salon itself or at the Louvre?"
M. Vailliant opened his mouth as if he were about to say something emotional; then rubbed his chin and stepped to one side to have another look at the painting.
"Of course I don't think it is as good as Millet—not quite," Helen proceeded, forcing her measure a trifle. "Isn't it wonderful to find a genius at Mervaux so unexpect——" She broke off her satire helplessly.
"Quite!" said M. Vailliant, looking at her and rubbing his chin again. "I'll put the painting on the back wall to lighten up the gallery—good contrast, line and colour," he went on. "This is the lot I have chosen for the exhibition," he said, indicating the pile on the table.
"You mean it! You mean it!"
But the smile on M. Vailliant's face told her without words that he did; and reaching across the table, in her quick impulse, she took his hands in hers. He felt their pressure tighten so that his soft palms were almost doubled over as, unheeding her mother's exclamation at the action, she demanded:
"Do you think that I ought to go and learn to be a nurse, or can I make my living drawing these things?" And as suddenly as she had seized his hands she drew away and spread out hers in an appeal: "Honest! No nice little phrases, but honest!"
"Nursing!" exclaimed the dealer, lifting his hands with outstretched fingers, horror written on his face. "Giving sick people medicine and adjusting bandages! You, my girl! No! Who ever suggested it?"
She seemed to draw nearer, though she stood motionless, such was the intensity of her inquiry.
"A living, I mean! I must decide! I can't stand it any longer!"
M. Vailliant rubbed his chin again and became the business man.
"I'm willing to give you the chance," he said. "We'll hold the exhibition—provided there isn't war. War! That's the end of everything—no art sold then. And the news is bad, very bad to-day. Yes, I'll give the exhibition if you will agree to terms. Talking business and no nonsense, now."
The terms were that he should have the disposal of all her work for three years on the regular commission basis. Helen agreed in a voice that sounded hollow in her own ears.
"If there were not a prospect of war——" He looked again at the painting. "Well, even if there is going to be war I'll buy these two top drawings and the painting for a thousand francs. Check now. Do you agree?"
Then M. Vailliant permitted himself to smile without rubbing his chin; and he kept on smiling as he wrapped up the painting and the charcoals.
"I think we'll make them go," he said. "If there isn't war I'll come down and get the others for the show and we'll have a talk together, young woman, about the future. If there is war"—he gave his shoulders a Gallic shrug. "I go to join the colours. Who knows? There is only France, then."
Leaving behind a contract and a check and a young woman still and wide-eyed, he rode away. Not until he was out of the grounds did he permit himself a long-drawn breath of satisfaction, as he leaned back on the cushions and lighted a cigarette, this cold trader in art.
"My emotion got away from me again!" he said. "I'll never be a real dealer if I can't control it. Why, if you discovered a Rembrandt you oughtn't to let on! It didn't matter with that girl, though. Nice chateau. Mother seemed well-to-do, but how eager the girl was for the thousand francs! One never knows. Probably oughtn't to have mentioned etching. Better for her to stick to charcoals and make a vogue. My enthusiasm again! Splotches of colour, as she says—not enough. But I think there is more to come. As for the other's painting—faint stuff, without soul; teacher-taught-me stuff—pouf! But if Mlle. Helen only had her sister's beauty I'd have a dry point of her for the exhibition, introduce her about—surely would be a go. But no beautiful woman can ever paint. Everybody admires her so much as a subjective work of art that she can never improve in her objective art. Why should she? One good thing that Mlle. Helen is so plain—no danger of her ever marrying. She's suffered, that's it—that's the quality you must have! And the likeness in voice between those two girls, except when she was laughing or became emotional. Then she was rather attractive. The fire in her, her talent, shone out of her eyes and made you forget how plain she is. She wouldn't be so plain, either, if it weren't for the nose. Some enemy wished that nose on her! Well, I made her happy. Think of that, you hard-headed Parisian, you brought triumph for that girl!"
Triumph was not the word to describe Helen's feelings after M. Vailliant's departure, as in the reaction of exhaustion, which required that she dab the moisture out of her eyes, she leaned against the wall. Relief, joy, gratitude! Through a mist she saw her mother and Henriette looking at her, their strange, puzzled expression not defined. She grasped only the fact of them and their nearness. All rancour had passed out of her heart. Her vitality surging back, she put her arms impetuously around her mother's neck and kissed her.
"Don't choke me!" gasped Madame Ribot.
"I didn't mean to! But I shall you, Henriette!" and she embraced her sister, in turn.
"I should say you would!" gasped Henriette.
"I'm afraid that repose is foreign to your nature," said her mother.
"It must be," returned Helen, as she released Henriette. "Oh, I've been ugly to you sometimes, because I couldn't help drawing and knew I ought to, but I'll never be again! It's all too good. I want to be alone with it!"
Emancipation was the real word. She went forth into the open air, freed from the cage, to test her wings. More strands of hair loosing as she raced along, she struck the fields and through the village, calling out to all the people she knew, but not stopping to talk, and on up to a hilltop, where the plotted glory of the farmlands lay before her, with the fields of grain waving gold.
A thousand francs! was her mundane thought. She could live on that a long time in Paris, drawing and studying. It did not matter how plain she was. She might have a nose as big as a prize potato and yellow eyes and rat teeth. People were not going to look at her, but at her pictures. Her face need never hurt her again. She did not know that she had a face when she was drawing. She was young, with the long span of years stretching straight before her—straight, straight, like the great main roads of France! It was all clear—unless war came. But it could not come. It was too hideous a thought. The world was too beautiful to be drenched with blood; too wise to be so foolish.
Returning homeward she thought of many things; even of that seventeenth cousin and how she would like to do a charcoal of him. She would, while Henriette painted him. With no idea of the time that had elapsed, dust-covered, a rent in her gown from a thorn-bush, she burst in on her mother and sister, who were halfway through dinner.
"You are a sight!" said Madame Ribot. "Do change before you sit down!"
Upstairs in her room she looked into her mirror with a new sense of defiance.
"Oh, you are plain, but do you think that matters?" She held her hands up in front of her face. "Five fingers like everybody else and they can hold a crayon or a brush! Silly!" She laughed again and the mirror laughed back in the glorious secret of—triumph was the word, this time.
"M. Valliant must really think highly of your charcoals," said Henriette at table, "or he wouldn't have taken the painting."
"Yes, that was very surprising," said Madame Ribot.
"But remember I got the thousand francs! Isn't that the proof of the pudding from an art dealer. I'll set up a studio in Paris, a tiny one in a garret, and get my own meals—thrifty me! And I'll be away from home, mother, as much as if I were nursing—I mean, I'll be independent, as I ought to be."
She went on talking about her plans, unconscious that Henriette and even her mother were slightly inattentive.