Eugenia, alarmed for her standards, annoyed and aroused, disputed the point with warmth, "That"s only because you know who she is. If you didn"t, you"d take her for the concierge"s country cousin."
Marise shook her head exasperatingly, "No you wouldn"t. She has _cachet_. You can see it a mile away."
Eugenia suddenly conceded the point with grudging wonder, "How does she _do_ it?" she marveled, unreconciled.
"Personality," diagnosed Marise, and then seeing that Eugenia"s face looked really clouded, she stopped her teasing abruptly, ashamed of the unkind impulse which drove her to it, and of the malicious pleasure she took in it. What was the inner irritation with everything that kept her so aware of other people"s weak points and so easily led into playing ill-naturedly on them. Now, here and now, let her resolve she would never tease Eugenia again.
But she knew she would.
She did, however, resist an easy opening, given her by the next remark of Eugenia"s, as she looked across the beautiful room, "What _makes_ it all so just right? I"m going to start in at that corner, and look at every single thing, and find out _what_ makes it right."
Marise restrained the mocking words on the tip of her tongue, and turned away to the half-open window, near which she stood. Across the empty street in the pale gold of the spring sunshine, the vaporous young green of the Luxembourg showed like a mist through the tall iron palings. The light blue sky above was veiled with hazy white clouds, stirred by a young little spring breeze, which blew languorously on the girl"s cheek.
It came over her, all of it, with a soft rush, the invitation to life, the lovely, treacherous, ever-renewed invitation to live. And she drew back from it, with her ever-renewed determination not to be taken in by it. It was always too horribly lovely in May. It made her ache, it made her want to cry, it made her horribly unhappy. How detestable to have it so lovely, looking so seductive as though this were only the promise of something lovelier ... when there wasn"t anything to redeem the promise, when it was all just a part of the general scheme to fool you.
Behind her Eugenia"s voice said enviously, "Where did she get all these terribly quaint Louis XVI things?"
How thoroughly Eugenia"s English diction teacher had rooted out that "turribly" of Eugenia"s, thought Marise.
Aloud she answered, "She began collecting years ago, before anybody else thought of it."
"I shouldn"t think a teacher would have much money to collect."
"Oh, she picked them up for nothing, in corners of whatever province she happened to be in, out of barns and chicken-houses and attics."
Eugenia said complainingly, "It seems to me she always has been able to pick up something for nothing. Look at her husband."
Marise said over her shoulder, "Oh, she didn"t get much, when she got him. He never would have been anything except his good looks, if she hadn"t taken him up. And she didn"t get him for nothing--not much! Mlle.
Hasparren says--every one who knows them says--that she made him. She writes his speeches now. I"ve seen her. And never bothers him by being jealous."
"I should hope _not_," commented Eugenia. "She"s ages older than he. And he"s such a ripping good-looker."
Marise found Eugenia"s fervent accent rather distasteful. Not that she minded her latest fad of finding married men so much more interesting subjects than the others. Eugenia"s affairs never lasted more than a minute anyhow. But she wished Eugenia would pick out somebody with more brains than Mme. Vallery"s husband, somebody not so well satisfied with himself.
"He"s an awful imbecile," she said.
"What did Mme. Vallery marry him for, if she"s so terribly intelligent?"
challenged Eugenia. She delighted in using the words she had formerly mis-p.r.o.nounced, and giving them the purest, most colorless intonation.
There was not a trace now, in her speech, of the sweet, thick, unstrained honey of her original southern accent.
"She has brains for two," said Marise shortly, displeased by the direction of the talk. As a matter of fact, Mme. Vallery had once informed her why she had married her handsome, unintelligent husband.
She had said warningly one day, when Marise had drawn back from a match Mme. Vallery had proposed for her, "Don"t carry that too far, dear child. You will have to give in to the flesh sooner or later. You might as well do it young, before the growth of your intelligence spoils your enjoyment of it, as wait till you"re driven to it, as I was. It"s not amusing in the least, to have to take it all mixed with the contempt of your brains. You"ll find you have to take your share, one way or another."
Marise looked out frowningly at a great beech tree bursting into life in the garden across the street. It held its huge, flowering crest proudly into the spring air. To look at it was like hearing a flourish of trumpets, triumphal, exulting.
That was all very well for trees, thought Marise, that stupid, yearly emergence into a life that promised so much and brought futility.
Along the gravel-walk, inside the Luxembourg, under the hedge of lilacs, under the new splendor of the great beech, a young man and a girl in a pale gray dress were strolling. They looked at each other, and smiled.
"That"s the way my father and mother probably walked together," thought Marise, wincing. "That" was one of the clumsiest, most obvious parts of the general conspiracy to fool you. But when you had the key to the code, as Marise had, there was little danger that you would be taken in.
"I think I hear them coming," said Eugenia, "I do hope Monsieur is with her! Not that he ever condescends to pay the slightest attention to me!"
She a.s.sumed carefully a pose of unconscious ease on her small, spindle-legged chair. Marise turned around from the window and looked at her with appreciation. Was it only two years ago, that Eugenia had scrambled up from the crumpled bed on which she had lain a-sprawl?
"n.o.body can say _your_ genre is not decorative, Eugenia," she remarked with the sincere intention of pleasing the other girl, "that"s a perfectly glorious toilette, just right. And oh, how divinely that broadcloth is tailored."
Eugenia looked at her resentfully, with a flash of her old suspicion that she was not being treated as an equal.
"I haven"t any _cachet_, and you know it," she said, "if Mme. Vallery can have _cachet_ do you suppose I"m going to be satisfied with just chic?"
Marise felt one of her claps of laughter rising within her, but kept it back, as the beautifully proportioned paneled door opened to admit their hostess. A tall, spare, stooped, gray-haired woman, dressed plainly in fine black, with a shrewd, wrinkled, fresh-colored face, well-washed and guiltless of the smallest trace of powder. She looked like an elderly Jesuit, one who wields a great deal more power than he likes to show.
"Good-day, my children," she greeted the girls in a clear voice, with the utmost simplicity and directness of intonation. "Have we kept you waiting long? I told Auguste that we were a little late."
Auguste, magnificently tall and magnificently bearded, having now followed her in, the four sacramental hand-shakes were accomplished, Eugenia"s this time the promptest of all.
After the equally sacramental exchange of salutations and questions and answers had been achieved, questions as to health and general news, which did not in the least denote any interest in these matters, answers which were p.r.o.nounced with perfunctory indifference and received in the same way, the necessary civilized preliminaries were considered disposed of, and the first moves of the game could be taken. M. Vallery"s gambit was to say, looking admiringly at Eugenia, "Such a piece of the month of May oughtn"t to be within four walls. Come over to the balcony a moment, and let me show you your sister, the Luxembourg, in flower."
Mme. Vallery"s move was to sit in the winged, brocaded, deep-cushioned _bergere_, and motion Marise to sit beside her.
"Let"s get our business done and off our hands first of all," she said, smiling up at the tall girl in an admiration as frank as her husband"s for Eugenia, and for Marise, vastly more valuable.
The others, in a little chiming burst of chatter and high spirits, moved off towards the balcony. Mme. Vallery glanced after them with an inscrutable expression and then at Marise with a brisk, business-like manner.
The matter at issue just then, the occasion of the girls" call, was a fete de charite at the lycee, over which Mme. Vallery"s sister was Directrice, shoved up to that position, so the lycee teachers said, by the political pull of Madame Vallery herself. But even they could not deny that the connection was highly advantageous for the lycee. There was not another one in Paris, which felt itself more "protege" in high places, more sure of its standing with the Ministry of Education. And its annual charity fete, from being the usual small-bourgeois bazar with home-made ap.r.o.ns and pin-cushions on sale, and perhaps an inexpensive conjuror pulling rabbits out of silk hats in the a.s.sembly-room to amuse the children, had become one of the most elaborate and unique annual events of the city. A good part of Tout-Paris lent its highly ornamental presence to these affairs, and helpless before Mme. Vallery"s energy and ac.u.men, always left much more of the contents of its purse than it had the slightest intention of leaving in the amusingly decorated stalls where pretty, well-trained amateur salesgirls sold the goods furnished at cost (under pressure from Mme. Vallery), by the most fashionable shops in Paris.
This year Marise had been asked to play, along with two other de la Cueva pupils, in the afternoon concert which was the _clou_ of the three days" fete. Mme. Vallery had written her to ask her to come to talk over the choice of music, and to Eugenia"s surprise and extreme pleasure had mentioned casually that she would be glad to see her pretty friend, Miss Mills, also. Marise had instantly wondered what she wanted to get out of Eugenia, and now behind her fresh, open, unlined young face she was hiding a determination to find out what, and to keep Eugenia from being unduly exploited. She might tease Eugenia herself, but she had an elder-sister feeling of protective care towards her. Eugenia was so awfully defenseless, in spite of her money, and so nave still in spite of the sophisticated lore and manners which she had so energetically acquired. She had not learned that thorough-going suspicion of everything, which is the only valid protection against life.
But Mme. Vallery said nothing whatever about Eugenia, other than to comment in pa.s.sing on how excessively pretty she was, a real late-Regence type, such as one seldom sees nowadays. Marise found herself, as usual, quite helpless before the Vatican antechamber suavity of the older woman, and reflected, not without some resentment, that she probably seemed as nave to Mme. Vallery, as Eugenia did to her.
After some desultory talk about other features of the fete, they got out a pile of music, went together to the piano, where Marise tried the effects of various combinations, and finally decided on a desirable one.
All this time M. Vallery and Eugenia spent on the balcony, leaning over the railing, the sound of their voices and occasional laughter coming in pleasantly through the open windows. They came in together, when Mme.
Vallery summoned them to share the Muscat and hard sweet biscuits which it was part of her genre to serve at four o"clock instead of the newly introduced tea.
"Business is over," she announced, settling herself in the chair back of the little stand, where the tray stood. "Now for some talk." She put her hand to the crystal carafe and held it there for a moment. Another of the ecclesiastical details of her appearance was the beauty of her hands, white and shapely.
M. Vallery seated the girls and then himself, smiling into his beautiful, glistening brown beard. Eugenia too was smiling, with a dazzled look of pleasure. Mme. Vallery looked down at the wine she was pouring. Marise suppressed a qualm of distaste for M. Vallery, and started the talk by laughing outright as at a sudden recollection of something comic. She explained that she had just had a letter from America, from an old cousin of her father, who always kept her au courant of the quaint and humorous goings-on of the country-side.
"Her letters are as good as a comic paper," said Marise, sipping her wine.
"Translatable?" asked M. Vallery, "most of the comic things that happen in the French country-side aren"t. But they"re very funny for all of that." He laughed reminiscently and stroked his beard.
Memories of Jeanne and Isabelle, and what they considered comic stories rose blackly to Marise"s mind. She turned a gay, laughing face to M.
Vallery and translated for his benefit Aunt Hetty"s latest story about what happened when a skunk got into the hen-house, and she and Agnes went to the rescue at midnight in their night-gowns and night-caps. It was as much to drown out what was going on inside her own mind, as to amuse the others that she did her liveliest best by the story, telling it with the gusto and brio which made her a favorite with people who liked youthful high spirits. It was broad farce, nothing else, and she did not draw back from the farcical color it needed to carry it off. It was a story, she told herself, that either made people laugh _aux eclats_, or it was a failure. Her audience was certainly laughing _aux eclats_ when she finished the account of the homeric night-battle, laughing and wiping their eyes.
"That reminds me," said M. Vallery, his eyes glistening with mirth, "of a story about a love-sick dog that my uncle used to have."
"You"re not going to tell that story here," announced his wife, with the calm accent of mastery, which once in a while slipped from her in an unguarded moment. He went through the form of protesting, claiming that it was nothing--nowadays people were not prudish--but his wife settled the matter by taking the floor herself, turning to the girls, and saying laughingly, "That uncle of my husband"s--he was one of the old school--out of a Balzac novel of the provinces. There aren"t any more like him. It was through a to-the-death quarrel with him that Auguste and I met each other."