INSIDE the house, she listened until the creak of boots on the snow died away. Then she moved off along the hall toward the corridor. She walked uncertainly and from time to time leaned against the wall for support. The spot of light from the electric torch preceded her slippered feet, a bright moving circle which seemed to devour and destroy the streak of flooring which it crossed on its way to the storeroom. Weakly she opened the door and stepped inside.
“It’s all right, now. I’ve sent them away.”
The books in the great box stirred with a heaving motion and out of them presently emerged Krylenko, pale and shaken. He climbed out and as his foot struck the floor, Lily gave a little cry and pitched forward so that he caught her suddenly. The electric torch dropped to the floor. The glass shattered with a faint pop and the room swam in a thick, soft darkness.
She did not faint. In a moment she recovered herself and managed to stand upright, but she did not move away from Krylenko. She stood there, waiting. Slowly his powerful arms closed about her with the vague gesture of a man wakening slowly from a profound sleep.
“It’s all right,” she whispered faintly. “I’ve saved you.”
He made no other answer than a faint crooning sound. He stroked her hair gently with his strong, calloused hand, and tried to quiet the violent trembling which once more had taken possession of her. Again the house was silent save for the distant, ghostly creaking.
Perhaps he was seized by an overwhelming sense of awe which until that moment he had never experienced ... an awe for some unknown and terrific force against which he was helpless, like a little child. It may have been that, as Irene believed, he had never known any woman, that he had been pure as a saint. If these things had not been, it is impossibleto say what might have happened. He stood holding Lily close to him, kissing with a strange, awed gentleness the white line of her bare throat.
He discovered presently that she was sobbing.... Lily, who never wept. It was a terrible heartbreaking sound as if, all at once, she had sensed the tragedy of a whole lifetime, as if she stood in a vast and barren plain surrounded only by loneliness.
Krylenko’s hands and arms became unaccountably gentle. His cheek brushed against her white forehead with a comforting, caressing motion. And presently he lifted her as easily and as gently as he had lifted the wounded striker at Mrs. Tolliver’s command, and bore her from the room and down the dark corridor. She lay quietly, still sobbing in the same heartbroken fashion.
Thus he carried her into the long drawing-room and placed her among the brocade cushions of the divan, her amber hair all disheveled, her eyes bright with tears. For a moment he stood by her side awkwardly, silent and incoherent, overwhelmed by some new and profound emotion. The fire of cannel coal had died down. In the grate there was nothing now but ashes. Silently he knelt beside the sofa and rested his blond head on her breasts. Neither of them spoke a word, but Lily’s hand returned once more to the old gentle caressing motion across his tired eyes.
The minutes slipped away, one by one in a quick stream as if they were no more than the trickle of a clear spring water which is beyond all peril of drought, as if time itself were nothing and eternity even less.
So engulfed were they by the mood that even the sound of a key turning distantly in a clumsy lock and the echo of a light footfall in the hallway failed to disturb them. They were, it seemed oblivious to everything until suddenly there stepped through the doorway the thin figure of Irene in the worn gray suit and battered black hat. At the sight of them she halted, an apparition with a tired white face, drawn and quivering. It was not until she gave a low convulsive cry that Lily and Krylenko discovered she was watching them. Krylenko remained on his knees, only straightening his body to look at her.Lily turned her head a little, gently, listlessly, almost with indifference.
Irene had become hideous. In her eyes was the light of fury. When she spoke her voice was cold with an insane, unearthly hatred.
“So,” she said bitterly, “it has happened!” The worn hat fell from her grasp. Her fingers intertwined with a strangling gesture. “I might have known it.... I should have guessed....” And then her voice rose to a suppressed scream. “You are no better than a street walker! You are damned forever! I have prayed.... I have prayed but God himself could not save you.... He would not want you ... a vile creature ... a strumpet!... to destroy all that I have spent my life to create.” She began to sob wildly. “To destroy in a night what cost me years.”
Slowly, silently, Krylenko rose to his feet. He watched Irene with a look of bewilderment, as if he found himself in a wild nightmare. Lily turned away silently and buried her face in the pillows. A Fury had descended upon them unawares.
Irene continued to cry. “I have known always.... I have known from the beginning.... I knew about the Governor.... I saw him go into your room.... Only God knows how many men you have had.... You are lost, damned, forever!” The terrible sound of her weeping echoed and reechoed through the silent old house.
Lily raised her body from the cushions and sat with her silver slippers touching the floor. “What are you saying, Irene?” she asked. “You are mad. There has been nothing ... nothing ... nothing. You are mad!”
It was true that for the moment Irene was quite insane, yet her madness endowed her with the clairvoyance that is beyond sanity. She rushed toward Lily. She would have strangled her but Krylenko stepped between them and held her as if she had been an angry bad-tempered little child.
“Ah, don’t lie to me,” she cried. “I’m no fool. I can see. It is written in your eyes. Both of you.... I know. I know!... It is there! I see it!”
She struggled fiercely in the powerful grasp of Krylenko.“Let me go.... You ... You are no better than the others ... a common beast, a swine like the others ... a swine like all men, lying to me all these years. And on a night like this. May God damn you both in Hell forever and ever!”
She freed herself and sank to the floor at Krylenko’s feet. The tirade gave way to a torrent of wild hysterical sobbing. Her pale, battered face was all distorted, her thin hair disarrayed. She collapsed suddenly into a barren shattered old woman, abandoned by life. She had lost in her battle against something which was far stronger than herself, stronger even than Lily and Krylenko. She was broken, pitiful.
Lily sat by helplessly, her own tears dried now. She turned the rings round and round on her fingers and in the gesture there was a concentrated agony.
“You must not mind her,” she said presently. “She is not well.” Then she rose slowly and moved toward her sister. “Irene,” she said softly. “Irene.”
But Irene shuddered and drew away from her. “Don’t touch me ... evil one! Don’t touch me!” she cried monotonously.
“Perhaps if she had rest,” said Krylenko. “Perhaps if she slept.”
Irene kept up moaning and rocking. “In the Flats they’re dying.... In the Flats they’re dying ... and you two up here, like beasts all that time ... like beasts!”
Lily began to walk up and down the long shadowy room in a wild distracted manner, as if the contagion of her sister’s hysteria had touched her too. “There is nothing I can do,” she kept saying. “There is nothing.... Perhaps if we left her....”
It was Krylenko who solved the difficulty. He bent over Irene and picked her up despite her protests. She screamed. She wept. She would have scratched and bitten him if his arms had been less powerful and his grip less certain. He turned to Lily. “Where is her bed?”
He spoke with a curious, intimate understanding. In an hour he had come nearer to Lily than ten years had brought him to the chaste fanatic sister.
Silently Lily led the way up the long stairs while he followedbearing Irene who moaned like a wounded animal. At the door of the room with the white bed and the pink-gilt image of the Virgin, he halted as if fearful of desecrating its purity. But Lily led the way boldly and together they laid the sister upon the narrow white bed. When they had gone out, closing the door behind them, the sound of her faint moaning haunted the dark hallway.
At the door of her own room Lily halted. “Wait,” she said, and left him, returning in a moment, her arms burdened with blankets.
“Take these,” she said. “It will be cold in the drawing-room.” In all the confusion, she had not forgotten his wounds, his comfort.
Krylenko smiled vaguely. “It will be hard to sleep anywhere to-night,” he said softly.
“But it is spoiled now ...” replied Lily. “Everything.”
And Krylenko turned away and went silently down the stairs.
It is true that no one slept until the dawn. Irene and Lily did not sleep at all. The one lay awake sobbing and praying, the other lay with her head buried in the pillows keeping her body rigid to still its wild trembling. Krylenko was the only one who slept. With the coming of dawn he sank into a deadening thick slumber among the stained brocade pillows of the rosewood sofa.
There he slept undisturbed until midday, for with the curtains tightly drawn there was no light to waken him. When at last he did waken, he found on the lacquer table beside him a note, which read:
“There are some things in this world which are impossible, things fate herself will not permit. This you will understand, I am sure. I have gone away. Irene has gone too. Where she has gone I do not know. Perhaps it does not matter. There is small chance of our ever meeting again. Our paths lie too far apart.... I have arranged for you to remain in the house ... as long as it is necessary. As long even as you desire it. There is no one but yourself and the two black servants. They have been told. It is my house. It would pleaseme to think of you there. It would please me ... and my mother too ... to know that you were safe inside it still leading the strike. It is a good place, for you can keep in hiding and still lead the fight. My blessings are with you and your cause.”
The note was signed with Lily’s name, and underneath it in the same sprawling hand was written, “O God! I love you. Good-by.”
She had come in some time between the dawn and the broad daylight to leave the note by his side. She had passed him and gone away without a word, whither he could not possibly know. Nothing remained save a confused memory of her and this short, enigmatic, note which avowed nothing and yet everything.
For a long time Krylenko held the bit of paper between his strong heavy fingers, staring dully all the while at the generous impetuous writing. At last he took out a battered cigarette, put a match to it, and at the same moment set fire to the wisp of paper which he tossed among the cold ashes of the dead fire....There are some things in this world which are impossible.
He got up and began pacing the floor angrily, up and down, up and down, scarring the polished floor at each step. It made no difference now. There was no one there any longer to use the floor. Presently he began muttering to himself. “They are no different than the others. They are all alike. When they are tired they run away because they are rich. Damn them and their money!”
And then all at once he went down upon his knees before the sofa and seizing one of the stained cushions in his arms, he kissed it again and again as if it were Lily instead of a feather-stuffed bit of brocade which he held in his arms.
HE did not quit the old house. He remained there in hiding to direct the strike. He was still there when Hennery packed the glowing Venice of Mr. Turner and the handsome malignant portrait of John Shane to be shipped to Lily in Paris. From the old house he sent out to the strikers message after message of encouragement and exhortation, until, at last, the strike was lost and there was no longer either need or place for him in the Mills or in the Town. No one knew when he went away or whither it was he went.
And the greatest of all the stories of Shane’s Castle remained a secret. The Town knew nothing of the greatest sacrifice ever made within its walls.
THE drawing-room of the house in the Rue Raynouard was a long, high-ceilinged room with tall windows opening upon a terrace and a sloping lawn which ran down to the high wall that shut out the dust and the noise of the Rue de Passy. It was curiously like the muffled, shuttered drawing-room in the old house in Cypress Hill, not because the furnishings were the same; they were not. From Shane’s Castle Lily brought only two things ... the glowing Venice and the portrait of her father. Mr. Turner’s flamboyant painting hung above the black marble mantelpiece in the Rue Raynouard. The portrait of John Shane hung against the satinwood paneling opposite the row of tall windows. The similarity was not an easy thing to define, for its roots lay in nothing more tangible than the bond between old Julia Shane and her daughter Lily, in a subtle sense of values which the one had passed on to the other.
The cold, impersonal hand of a decorator had nothing to do with either room. There was no striving toward a museum accuracy of period. The effect was much warmer, much more personal than that. The distinction was achieved by the collection, bit by bit, of beautiful things each chosen for some quality which warmed the heart of the purchaser ... carpets, bits of crystal and carved jade on ebony stands, books, cushions, chairs, pictures, sconces, candelabra, brocades and old Italian damasks, footstools, and mirrors which coldly reflected the warm bodies of beautiful women. Even in a city where taste and beauty were the rule, the drawing-room in the Rue Raynouard was a marvel of these qualities. It was more beautiful than the rooms of Madame Gigon’s respectable friends; for these women were Frenchbourgeoisesand neither wealth nor decorators could endow them with a quality that descends from Heaven only upon the few and the blessed. These womenadmired Madame Shane’s drawing room and envied it ... all of them, Madame de Cyon, the Comptesse de Turba, Madame Marchand, the mysterious old Madame Blaise, who people said had been a famous beauty in her youth; Geneviève Malbour, who wrote novels as dowdy as herself and struck the literary note; even the rich Duchesse de Gand, who frequented the royalist soirées and the parties given by thechicJews, and only came occasionally to Madame Gigon to placate her husband whose title was created by the first Napoleon. They attempted to imitate the seductive, quiet beauty of Numero Dix but they failed somehow, perhaps because they could not resist introducing a pillow of just the wrong, violent shade or a pair of rubber plants, or some monstrous piece of furniture from the period of the Second Empire.
“This American” had outdone them, quite without striving or effort. Indeed if the success of Lily’s drawing-room had depended upon either of these things it would have remained forever as ugly as on the day she moved into it, to succeed a chocolate manufacturer whose growing prosperity led him to a small palace in the new German style on the Avenue de Jena. She was incapable of effort. If she had been poor, if she had been forced to work, she would have become sloven; even her beauty would have deteriorated and grown sloppy through neglect. It was money which stood between her and these disasters ... money which permitted her to enter a shop and say, “I will have this and this and this for my drawing-room,” money which permitted her to enter anysalonof the Rue de la Paix and say, “I will have this gown, or this one, or this,” money which permitted her to go to the hairdresser, Augustine, and say, “I will have my hair waved and my complexion treated.” And having been born with taste, she made no errors.
Although the friends of Madame Gigon spoke of her as “the American,” it is seldom that they thought of her as a foreigner. Only her indolence and her extravagance could have betrayed to a stranger the fact that she was not a true Frenchwoman. In the seven years that followed the death of her mother, Lily abandoned forever all thought of returning to America. She spoke French to perfection, indolently and gracefully, with afine smooth accent. Her son, for all his American parentage and British schooling, was French; or at least, not American. He had a taste for music, for pictures, even for poetry.
“Fancy that,” she remarked to Ellen. “Fancy that, and think what his father has become.”
And she held up a newspaper photograph of the Governor ... now the Senator ... clipped from one of the American newspapers which Ellen brought to Numero Dix. It portrayed him in the act of addressing the Benevolent Order of Camels in Detroit. The pose was in itself flamboyant. Everything about him flowed. His loose black cravat flowed in the breeze. His hair, worn rather long, waved behind him. His alpaca suit ballooned about his heavy figure. His stomach rested upon a flag-draped railing, and his face wore a smile that was old and familiar, the smile of one who patronized his audience. In the background there was a vague suggestion of a square, solid figure in a richly flowered costume, wearing a pince nez and a cloud of flowing veils ... obviously the figure of the Senatoress.
Though Lily sometimes mocked the Governor, she never mentioned him as the source of Jean’s restless vitality and intelligence. But it did not matter, since no one in her world and, least of all Ellen, was interested in the Governor or eager to defend him.
The women who came to her drawing-room were, first of all, “Madame Gigon’s friends.” Toward Lily, for all her good-nature and her submission to their world, their attitude was never more than that of acquaintances. She saw them many times a month but there remained always an insurmountable barrier. It existed perhaps because she was too indolent to make those overtures necessary to friendship, perhaps because deep down in the heart of their bourgeois respectability they detected in the American traces of the wanton. They came to the “salons” of Madame Gigon and Lily went in turn to theirs. But she never entertained in the evening save at small dinners of four and six, and she never went to balls. Her hunger for gaiety she satisfied in the midst of crowds, at the Opéra, in the music halls, at the races. And always she was accompanied by Jean or Ellen or Madame Gigon so that no one was ableto say that she was indiscreet. If she went out frequently with the Baron, he was after all the cousin and protector of the old woman who accompanied them. If the Baron came frequently to her house it was to see Madame Gigon who was flattered by his attentions and his gifts of money.
Yet it could not be said that she was more friendly with men than with women. The men admired her. Indeed men from the world of fashion, from the world of the Duchesse de Guermantes’soirées, sometimes mingled with the dowdy Bonapartists of Madame Gigon’s salon, brought there by friends who moved in the circle closest to “the American.” They were pleasantly received and sent on their way, having accomplished nothing. If they became a trifle ardent she called Madame Gigon or the Baron to her side and the incident ended without difficulty. The visits came to nothing, for Lily appeared to have no ambitions. She was bafflingly content. She might have had great success in a score of ways, for her flamboyant beauty was a sort rarely seen among French women and it attracted notice wherever she appeared. But she had no ambitions; she was both wealthy and content. People remarked her at the Opéra but it was seldom that any one was able to identify her, for none knew her. Her circle was small, dowdy and infinitely respectable. She lived quietly with old Madame Gigon, now almost blind, and a charming son. It seemed that she was even content to forego a second marriage. And among those who admired her, because she was so good-natured and lovely to look upon, was the wife of the Baron, a pretty blond woman, rich and stupid, the daughter of a manufacturer from Lyons.
Madame Gigon adored her in two quite distinct fashions. The first because Lily was pleasant, kindly and generous. The second adoration, less commendable perhaps but none the less thorough, was the adoration of a woman pinched all her life by poverty for a fellow creature who secured her declining years with every possible luxury. Madame Gigon could not possibly forget that it was Lily who had set her up in a situation worthy of a woman whose father had been ruined by his loyalty to Napoleon the Little. The widow of the curator of the Cluny Museum had grown very small and dry. Her face resembled a withered pomegranate both in texture and color. Her dog Fifihad long since been laid to rest in the dog’s cemetery on a little island in the Seine where Madame Shane had kindly raised a tombstone with Fifi in marble sitting on a bronze cushion, “tout á fait comme dans la vie.” Fifi had not one successor but two, both provided by Madame Shane to console “her poor old Louise.” One was a black and tan, for all the world like the departed Fifi, and bore the name of Criquette. The other, a perky black Scotty brought back from England as a surprise, bore the name of Michou. They slept in Madame Gigon’s room overlooking the garden and had their own corner in the Louis Seize dining room, where they ate when the rest of the household sat down at an enormous table lighted by tall candles. Like Fifi they had gone the way of gateaux and were stout and short of breath.
THESE four ... Lily, Madame Gigon, Criquette and Michou ... were the permanent tenants of Numero Dix. There were two others who came and went, spending now a week’s holiday, now a whole month or more. They even paid visits frequently to the lodge at Germigny l’Evec in the park of the Baron, where Lily spent the spring and the autumn of every year, taking a house during the summer at Houlgate where she lived as a Frenchwoman in the very heart of the small American colony. The transients in the establishment of Madame Shane were her son Jean and her cousin Ellen Tolliver. They flitted in and out like birds of passage, less regular in their arrival and departure, though no less spirited and noisy.
The Ellen Tolliver of the pompadour and starched shirt waists had become the Lilli Barr whom crowds packed concert halls to see and hear, whom music critics found themselves bound to commend—the same Lilli Barr whose photograph seated beside a great composer appeared in the Sunday supplements of American newspapers. This of course, the public never knew. It knew only that she was a fine pianist with a sensational presence and a vitality which reached out and engulfed them through the medium of surging music. It knew nothing of her past. Indeed there were few who knew she was an American. Her name might have been Russian or Austrian, Hungarian or German. It carried with it the glamor sought by the public which will receive the most sublime artist with indifference if her name happened to be Mary Smith and her origin Evanston, Indiana. This she realized. She shrewdly explained to Lily the evolution of her name.
“Barr,” she said, “is the name of my grandfather. I have a perfect right to it. Alone and unadorned it is not thrilling. Therefore I have chosen Lilli. That, my dear, is a tributeto you, because if it had not been for you I should probably be an old maid giving music lessons at fifty cents an hour to the daughters of mill clerks.” She laughed noisily. “Lilli Barr.... A great name, don’t you think? It will suit everybody. It will suit those who believe American musicians should be encouraged and it will suit those who must have a little exotic European sauce with their fowl. Lilli Barr.... It might be anything at all.”
“Lilli Barr” was a name which betrayed nothing of a rather materialistic elopement with a traveling salesman called Clarence Murdock. It betrayed nothing of Clarence’s quiet passing out of this life from a weakened heart too greatly tried by life with a robust and ambitious wife. It had nothing to do with a father, ruined by honesty, who wore away his middle age as clerk in an industrial bank. It gave no hint of a mother who, in an effort to follow her ambitious, migratory offspring, had kept a Manhattan rooming house for five years past. Decidedly, emphatically, it was an exotic name. There were even people who believed that she was the protegee of a German Baron named Unschaff (they had his name and the history of his amours) whom she repaid in the usual way. And this story Ellen would have been the last to deny, for she knew its value. She understood that the people who paid money for concerts must have something beside music. And she understood the value of money in a fashion never imagined by Lily. The critics might call her playing sensational, bordering even upon charlatanism, she would not deny it. The public liked an artist who understood the value of a gesture, who came upon the concert stage with air of a queen, who played with gusto and the sweep of a hurricane. She understood all that. It was not that she was insincere. There were those for whom she played exquisitely and with all the distilled beauty of a sensitive artist, with the same curious passion which had engulfed her music on that last night in the drawing-room at Cypress Hill. She was a clever woman, far more intelligent than Lily, and having been nourished in the midst of poverty and failure, her one God was success, a sort of embittered success which played upon the silliness and affectation of the world.
Certainly she had kept the promise made to Lily. She fittedno pattern, least of all the pattern of the Town. She had her own ruthless law, founded upon consideration for friends alone. She had her own thoughts and beliefs. Indeed she hated the pattern bitterly, so bitterly that she made a vow never to play in the Town no matter what the fee offered her. In appearance she resembled curiously her grandaunt, Lily’s mother. About her features there was the same bold carving. Her face was too long and her eyes a shade too green. Her figure held none of the voluptuous curves that softened her cousin’s beauty; on the contrary it was slim and strong. She walked with a fine free swing that carried in it a hint of masculinity. Beside Lily she was not beautiful at all; yet on the concert stage under the glow of the lights her beauty was infinitely more effective than Lily’s would have been.... Her energy was the energy descended directly from Hattie Tolliver. It crackled through her whole being. She was not like Lily, a woman of the world; there was a quality of directness and naivete, a breeziness springing from her background and her ancestry, which all the courts of Europe might never overcome. She was, above all else, herself, incapable of affectation or pretense. And this, she also understood, was a thing of great value because one expected it of the artistic temperament. An artist made no compromises.
ONE late afternoon in April, nineteen thirteen, when the trees in the garden were all feathery and soft with the first green of the Gallic springtime, Madame Gigon sat in her chair by the door of the long drawing-room bidding her guests good-by, one by one, as they left her usual Thursdaysalon. The drawing-room, owing to the sharp slope of the ground upon which the house was built, lay below the surface of the Rue Raynouard on the garden side of the house so that the guests leaving were forced to climb a long flight of stairs that led up to the street door. The stairway, opening directly into the drawing-room, provided a long, high vista leading up to a door, itself noticeable by its very insignificance. It was one of the charming features of the house that on the street side it was but one story high with a single door and a row of high windows which betrayed no hint of the beauty and space within its walls. On the garden side, however, the house presented a beautiful façade some three stories high, constructed of Caen stone and designed in the best manner of the eighteenth century. Lenôtre himself was said to have had a hand in the planning of the terraces and the pavilion that stood at a little distance completely embowered by shrubs and covered by a canopy made of the broad green leaves of plane trees. The house, after a fashion, turned its back upon the world, concealing its beauties from the eye of the random passerby, preserving them for the few who were admitted by the humble and unpretentious door that swung open upon the cobble stones of the Rue Raynouard. To the world it showed the face of apetite bourgeoise. To its friends it revealed the countenance of an eighteenth century marquise. And this fact had influenced for more than a century and a half the character of its tenants. The prosperous chocolate manufacturer abandoned it for the German palace in the Avenue de Jena for the very reason that Lily Shane seized itthe moment it fell vacant. It was no sort of a house for one who desired the world to recognize his success and the character of his life, but it was an excellent house in which to live quietly, even secretly. It stood isolated in the very midst of Paris.
Madame Gigon sat in a high-backed chair, her small, withered body propped among cushions, her feet resting on a footstool. Since her eyes had grown dim she used her ears as a means of watching her guests; and these, after the fashion of such organs, had become sharper and sharper with the failure of her sight.
A fat and dowdy woman dressed all in white and wearing an extravagant white veil moved up to her.
“Good-by, Madame Gigon,” she said. “You come to me on Friday. Don’t forget. The Prince himself will be there.”
Madame Gigon, instead of peering at the white lady, leaned back. “Ah, it’s you, Héloise.... Yes, I will be there on Friday. But you are leaving early.”
“No,” replied the white lady, who was a countess and possessed a fine collection of armor. “No. Others have gone before me. I am dining out in the Boulevard St. Germain.”
Madame Gigon smiled. “With your Jewish friends?”
“Yes. It is a long way.”
“They say her eldest daughter is to marry a rich American ... millions. He is called Blumenthal.”
“Oui ... a very nice gentleman and the Good God alone knows how rich.”
“Well, money is a great thing ... the foundation of everything, Héloise.”
“Yes ... Good-by ... On Friday then. And fetch Madame Shane if she cares to come.”
And the plump white lady made her way with effort up the long polished stairway to the unpretentious doorway.
Madame Gigon, holding Michou on her lap, began fondling the dog’s ears. She leaned back and listened. Most of the guests had gone. Her sharp ears constructed the scene for her. A shrill and peevish voice in the far corner betrayed Madame de Cyon. The old woman saw her, fat, with dyed black hair and a round face well made up to conceal the ravages oftime. A Russian woman, married to a French diplomat ... Bonapartist of course. She translated American novels into French to amuse herself and to help keep up the household in Neuilly. Yet she was rich, for her fat pig’s hands were covered with rings and the sable of her cloak was the best.
A man’s voice, ill-tempered and gruff, rose through the shadowy room. Captain Marchand, who did not get on with his wife. Tactless of Madame de Cyon to have led them to the bridge table to play with each other. Bridge-mad ... was Madame de Cyon ... bridge-mad, and she hated like the Devil to lose. To lose five francs was like losing one of her fat legs. Strange game ... this bridge. It put every one into a bad temper. Not at all like piquet.
“Deux pique!” announced Madame de Cyon.
“Passe!” ... “Passe!” ... “Passe!”
From the dining-room issued the sound of two voices in dispute, the one high-pitched, old and somewhat shrill, and the other rather deep and gentle, almost conciliatory. They drifted to Madame Gigon across the murmurous spaces of the drawing-room. Madame Blaise and “Mees Ellen’s” friend, Schneiderman. Madame Blaise was a Gasconne, old, shrill and vituperatory, yet somehow amusing and stimulating ... a little cracked perhaps but still full of spirit, and mysterious in the fashion of those whose existence has its foundations in a world of fanciful, half-mad unreality. She was tall and thin, with a mass of dyed red hair (it must have gone gray ten years earlier) under an old-fashioned purple bonnet trimmed with purple plumes and perched high on her head in the fashion of the eighties. Madame Gigon knew she was by the gateaux ... eating ... eating ... eating ... as if she starved herself at home. Yet she too was rich.
“Ah, you don’t know the Germans as I do!” came the high-pitched voice. “My fine young fellow! I tell you I have lived with them. I have been on business for the government. They are capable of anything. You will see....”
And then the voice of Schneidermann, mild and a little amused by the old lady. “Ah ...,” gently. “Perhaps ... perhaps. But I do not think that war is any longer possible.”
“Nevertheless,” persisted the voice. “One fine day you will go marching away like the rest.”
SCHNEIDERMANN was Alsatian, and Jew on his father’s side, rich, for his family owned steel mills at Toul and Nancy and in the very environs of Paris, as well as coal mines in the neighborhood of St. Quentin and La Bassée. Schneidermann, tall, handsome, swarthy ... was beautiful in an austere, sensual fashion as only Jews can be beautiful. He came sometimes to play the ’cello with “Mees Ellen,” choosing queer music they called “modern” that had none of the beauty and melody of Offenbach and Gounod.
The voice of “Mees Ellen” joining the pair in the dining-room.... “War!... War!... Nonsense! There can’t be any war. I must play in Berlin and Munich next season.” Her voice rang with genuine conviction, as if she really believed that war itself dared not interfere with still more amazing successes. Madame Blaise’ cynical laugh answered her.
“Ah, you young people ... you young people. What do you know of war and politics? I have been through wars, through revolutions, you understand. I know about these things. I am as old as time.”
The old woman was talking in her most fantastic vein. It was her habit to talk thus as if she were wise beyond all people. She was, as Madame Gigon said, a little cracked on this side of her.
“I know ... I know,” she continued to mutter in the most sinister fashion until an unusually large madeleine put an end to her talk.
“How much did you say ... eight francs?” It was the peevish voice of Madame de Cyon settling her bridge debts.
“Eight francs,” came the gruff reply of Captain Marchand. “Eight francs, I tell you.” And then the tinkling of the Russian’s woman’s innumerable gold bangles as she thrust her fat bejeweled hand into a small purse to wrench loose from it theprecious eight francs. “I had no luck to-day ... no luck at all,” she observed in the same irritable voice. “No cards at all. What can one do without cards? Now last week I won ...” And she fell to recounting past victories while Captain Marchand’s chair scraped the floor savagely.
And then the voice of Madame Blaise quite close at hand, bidding Madame Gigon good-by.
“On Tuesday, then, Louise. I shall expect you.”
“On Tuesday,” repeated Madame Gigon.
“And bring Madame Shane if she wishes to come. But not ‘Mees Tolliver.’ I can’t bear her and her American ways.” The old harridan bent lower, her reticule shaking with the aged trembling of her thin body. “That Schneidermann!” she observed scornfully. “He is a fool! The men I knew when I was young were interested in revolutions and politics ... not music. Music! Bah!” And to show her disgust she spat on the bare floor.... Then she made a hissing noise and swept up the long dim stairway, her boots squeaking as she walked.
Then the confusion of farewells as the last guests departed, Madame de Cyon passing by, still in bad humor over her losses.
“On Friday, Madame Gigon,” she said. “My husband will be there. He is home from the Balkans and full of news.”
“Of the wars I suppose.... On Friday, Madame.”
“And tell Madame Shane she is expected also.”
Then Captain Marchand and Madame Marchand, also in a bad humor because they got on badly. Madame Marchand’s day fell on Monday and she too asked the old woman to bring Madame Shane. Her invitation was made in the same oblique fashion as the other. “Bring Madame Shane if she cares to come.”
At last there remained no one save those whom Lily, in her vague, lazy fashion called “the family.” These were old Madame Gigon, Ellen Tolliver, Jean, herself and the Baron.
As the blond little Captain Marchand, pompously clanking his spurs as he walked, disappeared up the darkening reaches of the long stairway, Jean, who had been reading in a corner reserved for himself, sprang up with the bound of a young animal and ran across to Ellen and Schneidermann.
“Alors! Viens donc ... la musique!” he cried, seizing her by the hand while she struggled against his youthful strength, and Schneiderman laughed at his exuberance. She resisted, bracing her strong slim body and indulging in a mock struggle.
“Not a sound from me,” she replied. “Unless we talk English. I can make no more effort with this waiter’s chatter.”
It was a price which she exacted frequently, for she spoke French badly, though with great vigor, and with an accent so atrocious that it seemed quite beyond hope of improvement. Her English carried the drawling tang of the middle west. She called “dog”dawgand “water”watter.
Jean resembled his mother. His hair, like hers, was red though less soft and more carroty. His nose was short, straight, and conveyed an impression of good humor and high spirits. He was tall for his age and strongly built with a slim figure which gave every promise of one day growing into the bulky strength of the Governor. He possessed a restless, noisy, energy quite incomprehensible to Lily. To-day he wore the uniform of a cadet at the cavalry school at St. Cyr. It was the idea of the Baron, himself a cuirassier, that Jean should be trained for the cavalry. “If he does not like it, he may quit,” he told Lily. As for Jean, he appeared to like it well enough. He was as eager for a war as Madame Blaise had been certain of one.
“Come along, Nell,” he cried. “Be a good cousin, and play that four-handed stuff with me.”
Madame Gigon, with Michou and Criquette waddling amiably after her, stole quietly away to her room to lock her door against the hideous sounds which Ellen, Schneidermann and Jean made when they played what they called modern “music.”
From the shelter of a divan placed between two of the tall windows, Lily and the Baron watched the three noisy musicians. On the verge of middle-age, her beauty appeared to have reached its height. There are those who would have preferred her as a young girl, fresher, more gentle and more naive. But likewise there are those who find the greatest beauty in the opulent women of Titian, and it was this beauty which Lily now possessed. She wore a black tea-gown, loosely and curiously made with a collar which came high about her throat and emphasized the ivory green tint of her skin and the copper red of her hair. She lay back among the cushions watching Jean with the triumphant, possessive look which strayed into her dark eyes whenever her son was with her. It was an expression so intense as to be almost tragic.
The Baron smiled too, but his smile was concealed somewhat by the fierce black military mustaches that adorned his face. They were the mustaches of the French army, very long, very luxurious, and purposely rather ill-kempt. There was nothing silky about them. On the contrary they were the mustaches of anhomme de guerre—stiff, bristling and full of vitality. He was a dark, wiry Frenchman, with strong, nervous hands and very bright black eyes which clouded easily with anger. He was perhaps four or five years older than Lily and did not look his age. Indeed his figure was youthful and muscular with the hard, fierce masculinity which belongs to some men of the Latin race.
Whenever he regarded Ellen, it was with a stern glance that was almost hostile. They did not get on well. Even Lily, indifferent and unobservant, must have seen the hidden clash of their two strong natures. It appeared that he resented Ellen’s wilfulness and even the masculine simplicity of her clothes. On this evening she was at her best. Her dark hair she no longer wore in the manner of Lily. It was drawn straight back from her high forehead with an uncompromising severity and done in a knot low on the back of her strong, well-shaped neck. Jean dragged her by sheer force of strength to the piano where the two sat down noisily, the boy searching through the music while Ellen played the most amazing, delicate and agile roulades and cascades of notes on the polished ivory keyboard. Schneidermann, thrown a little into the background by the wild exuberance of the pair, drew up a chair and waited quietly until it was time for him to turn the pages.
And during these preliminaries Lily and the Baron rose and made their way silently through one of the tall windows on to the terrace and thence into the garden. Lily herself confessed that she could not abide the new music.
“I do not understand it,” she told her cousin. “And I do not find it beautiful. It is beyond me, I confess. I cannotsee what you and Jean find in it. I suppose it is because I am growing old. You and Jean belong to the same generation. I am too old for new ideas.” And for the first time her laugh was not all geniality and warmth. It carried a fine edge of bitterness, scarcely to be discerned but none the less unmistakable.
And now in the soft spring twilight of the garden she and the Baron walked along the neat gravel paths until they reached the wall shutting out the Rue de Passy. Here they sat for a time on a stone bench saying nothing, remaining quite still and silent. And at last as the darkness grew more heavy they rose and wandered off again, aimlessly and slowly, until in the shadow of a laburnum tree, the man seized her suddenly and kissed her, long and passionately. And after a little while when it was quite dark they entered the pavilion hidden by shrubbery where Jean lived when he was home on a holiday.
The garden lay breathless and silent. Even the rumbling noises from the street beyond the wall had died away with the coming of darkness. From the distant Seine arose the faint whistle of the St. Cloud steamer, and through the tall window drifted in wild fragments the savage, barbaric chords of Stravinsky’s music.
DAY in and day out Lily’s life followed its easy, happy course. Always there were diversions, always gaiety, always people. Yet there were times now—indeed they seemed to have begun upon her return from America following her mother’s death—when a cloud of sadness descended upon her, times when she would withdraw suddenly to her own room as if some tiny thing, a word, a gesture, an intonation, had set fire to a train of secret memories. Frequently she kept her room for the rest of the day, seeing no one, lunching and dining alone on a gilt table placed before her chaise longue by the window.
These sudden fits of melancholy disturbed Ellen who remarked on them gravely to old Madame Gigon.
“She was never like that before. I can’t see what it is that disturbs her.”
Madame Gigon saw no cause for alarm. “It’s true,” she said. “She was never like that before. But it may be that she grows tired. You see she is growing older, my dear Mees Ellen. All of us, as we grow older, like moments of solitude and quiet. It gives one time to reflect on life. You don’t understand that yet. You’re too young. But some day you will understand. As you get older you begin to wonder what it’s all about ... (pourquoi le combat).”
“Perhaps,” replied Ellen with a vigorous shrug. “I’m sure it can’t be her mother. It might, of course, be Irene.”
And they fell to discussing for the hundredth time the case of Irene, whom Madame Gigon had not seen since she was a little girl. They talked of her strange behavior, Madame Gigon wagging her old head, staring before her with sightless eyes.
“It is tragic ... a life like that,” she would say. “A life wasted. You know she was a pretty little girl.... She could have married.”
They spoke of her as if she were dead. It was true that to them ... to Ellen, to Madame Gigon, she was forever lost. Perhaps they were right, with that instinctive knowledge which underlies the consciousness of women chattering together over the strangeness of human behavior. Perhaps Irenewasdead.... Perhaps she had been dead since a certain night when the last traces of her faith in humanity were throttled. It was true that she had left the world and turned her faith toward God alone, as if she were already dead and in purgatory.
“She was always queer,” Ellen would say.
And then Madame Gigon, as if she were conscious of toying with thoughts of blasphemy, would say piously:
“But she is a good woman, who has given her life to good work and prayer.”
But she spoke as if trying to convince herself, as if she did not quite believe what she said.
And Lily, all the while, kept her secret. Undoubtedly she was no longer in her first youth. This may have depressed her, for she was a woman to whom beauty and youth were the beginning and the end. Yet the fits of melancholy had something to do with a more definite and tangible thing. They were associated in some way with a little enameled box in which she kept a growing bundle of clippings from the American newspapers which Ellen brought into the house at Numero Dix.
In the solitude of her room, she opened the box and reread them many times, over and over again until the edges became frayed and the print blurred from much fingering. They had to do with the career of a certain labor leader, a man named Krylenko who seemed a strange person to excite the interest of a woman like Madame Shane. The clippings marked the progress of the man. Whenever there was a strike, Krylenko appeared to take a hand in it. Slowly, clipping by clipping, the battle he fought was being won. The unions penetrated now this steel town, now that one. There were battles, brutalities, deaths, fires in his trail, but the trail led steadily upward toward a goal. He was winning slowly. That he was strong there could be no doubt. He was so strong that great newspapers printed editorials against him and his cause. They called him an “anarchist,” “an alien disturber,” “a peril to the great American nation” and, most frequently of all, “a menace to prosperity and the inalienable rights of property.”
Lily kept the enameled box locked in a drawer of her writing desk. No one had ever seen it. No one would see it until she died. It had been there for seven years.
It was on the morning after one of these attacks of melancholy, a few days after Jean’s visit, that the Town suddenly intruded once more upon the house in the Rue Raynouard.
Lily sat on the sunlit terrace of the garden before a late breakfast of chocolate and buttered rolls, opposite Ellen whose habit it was to arise early and pursue some form of violent exercise while her cousin still slept. This morning she had been riding in the Bois de Bologne. As a little girl she learned to ride under the instruction of her grandfather, old Jacob Barr, and she rode well and easily with the air and the skill of one who has grown up with horses. The languid Schneidermann accompanied her on these early morning jaunts. She owned her horse because in the long run it was more economical and, as she said, “No pennies slip through my fingers.”
She wore a tight black riding habit with a white stock and a low derby hat. The riding crop lay across her strong, slim knees as she smoked and watched Lily devour too many rolls and a too large bowl of rich chocolate.
Between them on the table lay the morning’s letters. In Ellen’s little heap there were three or four notes from struggling music students, begging help or advice from her, one from a manager proposing an interview with regard to an American tour, a bill from Durand the publisher. Lily’s pile was altogether different. It consisted almost entirely of bills, from Coty, from Worth, from Henri the florist, from Augustin the hairdresser, from Lanvin ... from ... on and on endlessly and at the bottom a letter from the lawyers who succeeded on the death of William Baines, “the old fogy,” to the management of Lily’s holdings in the Town.
The last letter she read through twice with so deep an interest that the chocolate grew cold and she was forced to send fora hot cup and more hot rolls. When she had finished she leaned back in the wicker chair, buried beneath the silk, the lace ruffles and the pale tiny bows of her peignoir.
“D’you know, Ellen,” she remarked, “I am growing too rich. I’ve no idea what to do with all my money.”
Ellen put down her letter abruptly and knocked the ash from her cigarette.
“There are plenty of places for it.” She slapped the envelope against her slim thigh. “I’ve had two letters this morning asking me for money ... from two music students. Heaven knows I’ve got nothing to spare. All that’s left over I send to Ma. What is it now? A gold mine or an oil well?”
“Neither,” said Lily. “It’s just the Town making me richer and richer. It’s from Folsom and Jones ... I guess they’re since your time. They’re lawyers and they handle Irene’s and my estate. They want me to sell the rest of the property we own.”
Ellen pursed her lips reflectively. “How much are they offered?”
“Something over five hundred thousand. They say they can get six in a pinch.”
She whistled softly. “Take it ... take it. Those old shacks can’t be worth that.”
“It isn’t the shacks,” said Lily. “It’s the land itself they want. The shacks aren’t even worth repair. Why, they were built, most of them, while father was still living. The lawyers hint that the Town is ashamed of them, that they are a disgrace to the Town.”
“I suppose it has changed,” remarked Ellen.
“The population has doubled,” said her cousin. “There aren’t enough houses for the people. Why, last summer people who came to work at the Mills had to live in tents for a time. Even the people on Park avenue let out rooms. The Chamber of Commerce asked them to. They appealed to their pride not to stop the tremendous growth. There’s been a tremendous....”
Ellen interrupted her. “I know ... I know.... Watch us grow. The biggest city in the state in ten years. Well, it’s money in your pocket. You’ve no kick coming.”
The chocolate and rolls arrived and Lily began once more to eat.
“I don’t see how you can eat all that and keep your figure,” observed Ellen.
“Massage,” said Lily. “Massage ... and luckily the time is coming when I can eat all I want and be as fat as I like. In another fifteen years I’ll be an old woman and it won’t matter what I do.” The faint bitterness again drifted through the speech, evasive and imperceptible.
“What does Irene say to your selling?” inquired Ellen.
“The lawyers say she wants to sell. You know I haven’t had a line from her in years. She’s in France now, you know.”
“In France!” said Ellen, her eyebrows rising in surprise.
“Yes, at Lisieux.”
“I should think you’d go and see her.”
“She wouldn’t see me if I went. What good would it do?”
THERE was a sudden silence while Ellen beat her riding crop against her leg. “I must say she’s very queer. I never understood her. You know when I was a girl, she gave me the creeps ... the way she had of looking at you with those pale eyes.”
“I know,” replied Lily. And then after a pause. “You know they want to buy Cypress Hill too. The Lord alone knows how many times they tried. They began before Mama died. Irene hasn’t any share in it. It belongs outright to me.”
“I suppose it’s the Mills.”
“No, not this time. The Town wants it now.” She paused while she buttered another roll. “They want it for a new railway station ... a union station, you know, for all three roads. It’s perfect for that. And each time they increase the offer. Now they write me that they’ve made a last offer. If I won’t sell, they’ll undertake proceedings to condemn it.”
During this speech the countenance of Ellen Tolliver underwent a complete metamorphosis. The devil-may-care look vanished slowly, replaced by a certain hardness, a squaring of the handsome jaw, a slight hardening of the firm lips. It may have been that while Lily talked her cousin was swept by a torrent of memories—memories of hurt pride, of poverty and indignities endured because she was helpless, memories of patronizing women and young girls who spoke of “poor Ellen Tolliver,” memories of her father’s defeats and disappointments, of Judge Weissman’s dishonesty and corruption, of her mother’s agonizing and endless struggle to keep up appearances. As sometimes occurs with individuals of strong personality, a whole life, a complete philosophy stood revealed for an instant in her intelligent face. She had run off with Clarence Murdoch “to show the Town.” She had become famous and successful because, deep down in her heart, she was resolved always toshow the Town how little it counted in her life, how great was the contempt she felt for it. It was always this thought—this more than everything else—which had driven her forward. And now came this new opportunity, perhaps the best of all, to block the Town, to thwart its most cherished desire. It was a chance to prevent a new and flamboyant effort to advertise its wealth, its prosperity, its bigness.
“As if,” she said aloud, “‘bigness’ was something to be proud of. Let them try and condemn it, Lily. I doubt if they can. Anyway I’d keep it just to spite them. It’s a chance to show your power.” She leaned earnestly across the table, striking it with her riding crop to emphasize her words. “You hate the place as much as I do. Why, it isn’t even the same Town we grew up in. It’s another place built upon filth and soot. It’s not that we’re fouling our own nest. Why, Lily, the Town your mother and my grandfather loved wasn’t that sort of place at all. It was a pleasant place where people lived quietly and peacefully, where they had horses and dogs and were decent to each other. And now that’s all buried under those damned filthy Mills, under a pile of muck and corruption with Judge Weissman and his crowd enthroned on the very top.” She stood up, her blue eyes flashing. “It’s changed the very people in it. It’s made them noisy, common, cheap. Damn it! I hate them all!” She struck the table a violent blow with her riding crop. “Don’t sell it. You don’t need the money. It’s nothing to you ... not even if they offered you a million!” And then she laughed savagely. “That’s the best part of it. The longer you hold it, the more they’ll have to pay you. The more prosperous they are, the more it will cost them to have a new railway station. You’re the one who has the power now. Don’t you see what power there is in money?... the power that grows out of just owning a thing?”
Lily, it appeared, was amazed by the passion of the sudden, outburst. For a time she lay back in the wicker chair, regarding her cousin with a thoughtful look. At last, she said, “I had no idea that you felt that way about it. It’s the way Mama used to feel. I suppose I never had enough of the place to really hate it.”
Ellen again interrupted her passionately. “If you’d had as much as I had, you’d have hated it all right.”
“I just ran away from it as soon as I could,” continued Lily. “Besides,” she added after a pause, “Mama left a letter asking me to keep Cypress Hill. She always felt that way about the Town.”
Ellen, persistent, bent over the table toward her cousin. The riding crop fell to the gravel terrace. “Promise me you won’t sell it, Lily.... Promise me you’ll keep it. It’s a chance to hit back.... Promise!”
And Lily, who after all was indifferent in matters of business, promised, perhaps because the violent revelations made by her cousin astounded her so completely that she was unable to think of any argument. Doubtless she had reasons of her own ... secret reasons which had to do with the worn clippings in the enameled box.
“I’ll keep it,” she replied. “They can wait until Hell freezes over. And besides you put the idea so that it amuses me. I’ll sell the other stuff and invest the money.”
Ellen interrupted her with a bitter laugh. “It’s funny, you know, that all this time they’ve been pouring money into your pocket. That’s the joke of it. In a way, it was all this booming and prosperity that helped me too. If you hadn’t been so rich, I suppose I’d never have made a success of it.”
Lily languidly finished the last of her chocolate. “I’d never thought of it in that way. It’s an amusing idea.”
Ellen was satisfied. Gathering up her letters she went into the house, changed her clothes, and in a little while, seated under the flaming Venice of Mr. Turner, she was working stormily at her music, filling the house with glorious sound until it overflowed and spilled its rhapsodies over the terrace into the garden where the first bright irises were abloom.
UPSTAIRS Lily made her way, after a toilette which occupied two hours, to the room of Madame Gigon. It was, amid the elegance of the house, a black-sheep of a room, its walls covered with books, its corners cluttered with broken fragments of Gothic saints and virgins, the sole legacy of the distant and obscure M. Gigon, curator at the Cluny Museum. In the center stood a table covered with dark red rep, heavily embroidered and cluttered with inkpots, pens and all the paraphernalia of writing. Bits of faded brocade ornamented the wall save for a space opposite the door where hung an immense engraving of the First Napoleon, dominating a smaller portrait of Napoleon the Little in all the glory of his mustaches and imperial. An engraving of the Eugènie by Winterhalter stood over the washstand, a convenience to which Madame Gigon clung even after Lily’s installation of the most elaborate American plumbing.
Madame Gigon huddled like a benevolent old witch among the bedclothes of her diminutive bed. At the foot, in a bright patch of sunlight, lay Criquette and Michou amiably close to each other and both quite stuffed with toasted rolls and hot chocolate.
Lily came in looking fresh and radiant in a severe suit and smart hat. They exchanged greetings.
“How are you this morning, Tante Louise?” she inquired of the old woman.
“Not so well ... not so well. I slept badly. The pain in my hip.”
Lily went and sat on the bed, taking the old woman’s hand which she caressed as she felt her pulse.
“You have everything you want?” she inquired.
“Oui ... everything.” There was a little pause and Madame Gigon peered at her with dim eyes. “I’ve been thinking how lucky I am.”
Lily smiled.
“I mean that I’m not left poor and alone. You’ve been good to me.”
Lily’s smile expanded into a laugh. “Nonsense.... Nonsense. It’s given me enough pleasure....”
“It seems like the hand of God,” said the old woman very piously.
“It may be,” said Lily. “Mees Ellen has been telling me it’s the hand of man.”
And Madame Gigon, not having heard the talk on the terrace, was puzzled. Secretly she disapproved Mees Ellen’s lack of piety.
“Mees Ellen plays well this morning ... beautifully,” said Madame Gigon. “She is an artist ... a true artist. Will you ask her a favor?”
Lily nodded.
“Will you ask her to play something of Offenbach? I’ve been hungry for it.” She looked feeble and appealing somewhat confused by violence of the life with which she found herself surrounded since the advent of Mees Ellen and the grown-up Jean.
“Of course,” said Lily.
“And one more thing,” said Madame Gigon. “This I must ask of you.... I’m too ill to go to Madame Blaise this afternoon. I want you to go and explain why I have not come. Tell her I am too ill.” A slight frown crossed Lily’s brow. Madame Gigon, with her dim eyes could not possibly have seen it, yet she said, “Madame Blaise admires you.... She thinks you are all that a woman should be ... a perfect woman.”
If Lily had felt any genuine hesitation, the faint flattery destroyed it, for she replied, “I’ll go, certainly. I’m lunching out and I’ll go there late and tell her.”
“Not too late.... She is easily offended,” said Madame Gigon. “You know she is a little ...” She made a comic gesture indicating that Madame Blaise was a little cracked.
Then Lily read to her for a time out of Faure’s History ofArt which undoubtedly bored her but gave Madame Gigon the greatest pleasure; and at last she left for her mysterious lunch. A little while later there arose from below stairs the tinkling melodies of the overture to Orpheus in the Underworld. Somewhere among the piles of old music in the drawing-room closet, Ellen had discovered the whole score and she played it now in a wild good humor. Sometimes the music became actually noisy in its triumphant violence. It was the playing of a woman who had achieved a victory.