PART I

I

It is a pity we do not die when our lives are finished. Jane may live another twenty years--a long time to wait, alone between two worlds. Jane is forty-three, I am five years older, Philibert is fifty-six, my mother nearly eighty, we are all alive, and strangely enough _Maman_ is the only one whose life is not yet ended. Hers will not end till the moment of her death. She has been a wise artist. She is still embroidering delicately the pattern of her days; she still holds the many threads in her fingers. Quietly, exquisitely she will put in the last stitches. They will be the most beautiful of all; they will be her signature, the signature of a lady. Then she will close her eyes and commend her soul to God and the perfect work of her worldly wisdom will be finished.

As for me, I see no reason why I should not live on indefinitely just as I have done, and on the whole I am more comfortable here than in Purgatory, a place that I imagine to be like the suburbs of London. I see myself there, tapping with my crutch, along endless tramway lines between interminable rows of dingy perky villas. This little street in the Faubourg Saint Germain is much nicer. It is old and proud and secretive; a good street for a cripple to live in; it shelters and protects him. Once he has entered it he has no distance to go to get home. It is usually deserted and the great pale houses show discreet shuttered windows with no one behind the shutters to stare at him. I am Philibert’s crippled brother. Something went wrong with me before I was born. Nothing else of importance has ever happened to me, except Jane’s marrying my brother.

Jane loved this little street. She said that it told her the story of France and conveyed to her all the charm of the Paris she loved best, the proud gentle mysterious Paris of the 18th century that with all its fine reserved grandeur assumes modestly the look of a small provincial town.

I came to live here when Philibert sold our house in the Rue de Varenne that is just round the corner, and my mother went to her new apartment near the Étoile. That was twenty years ago, and very little has changed in the street since I came to these rooms at the bottom of this little courtyard between Constantine’s big white house and the Embassy. The little man who peddled bird-seed has vanished long ago, his voice is no more to be heard chanting, but other street vendors still come by with their sing-song calls. What indeed was there that could change, save perhaps old Madame Barbier’s grocery shop at the corner, tucked up against Constantine’s stable wall? But even Madame Barbier has remained the same. Her hair is as smooth and glossy black, her tight corsage as neat, and her trim window with its glass jars of honey and the nice bright boxes of groceries is as it always has been. A thrifty respectable woman is Madame Barbier, with a pleasant word for her neighbours. For the rest, on the opposite side of the street there is the convent, with its pointed roof and the chapel belfry showing above the wall, and there are the five big houses with their great gates that make up the whole length of the street. Not a long street--often when I turn into it at one end, I recognize a familiar figure going out of it at the other, the good Abbé perhaps going home after confessing the sisters in the convent, or old Madame d’Avrécourt in her shabby black jacket, her fine little withered face under her bonnet, wearing its habitual enigmatic smile. Monsieur l’Abbé says that her voluminous petticoats are heavy with the sacred charms she has sewn into the hems, and that may well be; I know that her devotion is very great and her interest in the outside world very small, and the sight of her is comforting to me.

It is so quiet here, and so confined. It is like a cloister--or a prison--I am glad of that.

Tonight, Good Friday night, I can hear the good sisters in the chapel singing. The mysticism of their haunting chant penetrates the walls of this old house, and tonight because of their lamenting, because of their dread disciplined agony of supplication, the street is immensely deep and high, whereas yesterday it was just small and dim and worldly, with its houses blinking over its walls, a proud battered deceiving old street, hiding the rare beauty of its dwellings, guarding the secrets of its families behind mute shutters, till the day it should crumble to pieces or an insolent government should turn it upside down like an ash-bin.

It never, of course, could get used to Jane. Who of us did get used to Jane? Did I myself? Wasn’t she a big troubling problem to us all till the very end? How could we not be afraid of her? Poor magnificent Jane--fine timid innocent child--dangerous nature woman--dreadful crying message from a new bellowing land--what was she? What was she not? How could she fit in here? She was as strange here as a leopard beautifully moving down the grey narrow pavement. How she used to frighten the good Abbé. I have seen him scuttle into a neighbouring doorway to let her pass, as if there were no room for him along the stones she walked so grandly. It was true. There was no room for any one but Jane when she came, and now that she is gone never to come back again, the place is as dreary and empty as an abandoned cemetery and the light is as insipidly pale as the half shadow in a sick room. She has left a sickness in this place, because she came here sometimes to see me--and won’t come any more.

And yet I stay on here. I shall stay here always. I have no reason to go anywhere now that I have been to America to see Jane, and have come back with the accurate awful knowledge of the great distance between us. Ah, that wide sea, that New York, a high cold gate into a strange over-powering country, those immense prairies, and those tiny farm houses, with tiny women watching the train; Jane, a tiny woman, Jane a speck, in a town that is a dot on the map. I will write down Jane’s story. I will remember it all, everything that she told me and everything that I saw, and will put it all down exactly with perfect precision and accuracy, and then, perhaps I shall understand her. Poor Jane--she wanted to understand life. She believed always that there was a reason for things, an ultimate reason and a purpose. She was no philosopher, she was a woman of faith. She should have been the wife of a pioneer, the wife of such a man as Isak, who went into the wilderness with a sack over his shoulder. Jane was made for such a man. I can see them together going out under the sky, he, grave, deep-chested, long-limbed, “a barge of a man,” and beside him a woman like a ship, moving proudly. And she married Philibert. Could any one who has ever seen her with Philibert miss the meaning of their extraordinary contrast? Philibert with his clever jaunty little body, his exaggerated elegance, his cold blue eyes and his impudent charm. She made him look like a toy man. She could have broken him in two with her hands. Why didn’t she? It is a long story. People say that American women are very adaptable, very imitative. Jane wasn’t. She never became the least like us, except in looks and that meant nothing. Paquin and Chéruit and Philibert did that for her almost at once, but her looks, even without their aid, were always a disguise, never a revelation of her self. Some women are all of a piece with their charming exteriors, Jane was a child cased in armour. As she grew older she learned to use it, she made it answer, but she used it to become something she was not. I call up her image as I write. I evoke Jane as she was that last year in Paris, the most elegant woman in Europe, the most stared at, and the most indifferent. I remember the cold hard nonchalance that so frightened people she did not like, and the brilliant metallic grace that rippled over her like gleaming light when she was pleased. I remember her excessive hauteur in public, the disdainful carriage of her strange head that was like a coin fashioned by some morose craftsman of Benvenuto Cellini’s time. I recall the sidelong glitter of her little green eyes. I remember her in public places, towering above other women like an idol, mute, glittering, enigmatic, her curious profile with its protruding lower lip, the tight close bands of jewels round her forehead. What a figure of splendour she was in those days, when Philibert had done breaking her heart; and when at the age of forty she had ceased to care and had reached the perfection of her physical type.

I think of her as she was when her mother brought her to Paris and married her to Philibert; a great strapping girl with a beautiful body and an ugly sullen face that deceived us all. How could one see behind it? Can one blame them? I alone caught a glimpse. And she developed slowly in our artificial soil. It took twenty years for her to become a woman of the world, une grande dame. That was what they made of her. I say they, but I suppose I mean primarily Philibert. It is horrible to think of how much Philibert had to do with making her what she finally was. And Bianca had a hand in it too. That is even worse.

We had realized the moment of Jane’s apotheosis. We had seen her beautifully and gravely spread her wings. We held our breath, waited entranced, and then, just then, she disappeared. Suddenly we lost her.

I refer, now, to our group, the little Bohemian group of kindred spirits who loved Jane; Ludovic, Felix, Clémentine and the others. Extraordinary that these friends of mine should have been the ones to love Jane best. They were a gay lot of sinners, quite impossible judged by any standard but their own. My mother only knew of their existence, through Clémentine. She has always been in the habit of discussing artists and writers as if they were dead. It was distressing to her that Clémentine who was related to her by blood and had married a Bourbon, should have held herself and her name so cheap as to consort with men and women of obscure origin and problematical genius. As for me, a man could do as he liked within measure, if he did not forget to keep up appearances. She regarded my friendship for my wonderful Ludovic and all the rest of them as a substitute for the more usual and less troublesome clandestine affairs of the ordinary bachelor. As I could never “_faire la noce_” like other men I was allowed these dissipations of the mind, but _maman_ never forgave me for introducing Ludovic to Jane. Dearest mother--it was no use telling her that Ludovic was the greatest scholar of his day. I didn’t try to explain. After all Ludovic needed no championing from me. I had wanted to do something for Jane; I had wanted to relieve in some way the awful pressure of her big bleak dazzling situation. Hemmed in by the complications of my relationship to her, how many times had I not groaned over the fact that she had been married by that awful mother of hers to the head of our house and not to some one else’s devilish elder brother, instead of to mine, I had pondered and tormented myself over a way of helping her that would not give Philibert the chance of coming down on me and shutting the big strong door of his house in my face, and at length my opportunity had come. It had seemed to me that for her at last the battle was over, and that she had achieved the desolate freedom which we could turn into enjoyment. Fan Ivanoff was dead. Bianca had disappeared. As for Philibert, he had grown tired of bothering her. Her sufferings no longer amused him. Her loneliness was complete. Although still to my eyes a figure of drama while we were essentially merry prosy people, she appeared to me to have acquired that spiritual mastery of events which made her one of us. I had reckoned without her child, Geneviève.

How could I have understood then the fear with which she contemplated her daughter’s future? And even supposing that I had understood everything, and had the gift of seeing into that future and had beheld the shadow of that lovely monster Bianca swooping down on Jane again to drive her to extremity, even supposing I had known what was going to happen and how that would take her away from us forever, I still could have done nothing more than I did do. It had seemed to me that we could provide her with a refuge, and so we did for a time. If Paris were to offer her any reward, any consolation, any comfort, then such a reward and such comfort was, I felt sure, to be found in the sympathy of these people who had gravitated to one another, out of the heavy mass of humanity that populated the earth, like sparks flying upwards to meet above the smoke and heat of the crowd in a clear lighted space of mental freedom. I gave her the best I had; I gave her my friends; and if they thought she had come to them to stay, well then so did I. Our mistake lay in thinking that because we were sufficient to each other we must be sufficient to Jane as well. I do not believe it occurred to any one of us how little we really counted for her; I, at least never knew it until the other day. Actually I had never realized that her soul was always craving something more, something like a heavenly certitude or a divine revelation.

Conceited? I suppose we were; but then you see the world did knock at our door for admittance. We had all literary and artistic Europe to choose from, and we did realize the things we talked of. I mean that we translated our thoughts into things people could see, ballets, pictures, bits of music. We worked out our ideas for the mob to gape at, and our success could be measured by the bitter hostility of such people as Philibert, who fancied himself as a patron of the arts--a kind of François I--and found us difficult to patronize.

Jane realized our worth of course. She had a touching reverence for our ability. She saw clearly the distinct worlds represented by my mother, and Ludovic; the one exquisite and sterile, beautifully still as a sealed room with panelled walls inhabited by wax figures; the other disordered and merry, convulsed by riotous fancies, where daring people indulged their caprices, scoffed at facts and respected intellect.

What Jane did not realize was the humanity underlying this life of ours. She thought us uncanny, but she could have trusted us in her trouble. And we on our side did not know that we did not satisfy her. After all, for the rest of us our deep feeling of well-being in one another’s company was like a divine assurance, an absolute ultimate promise. It was all the heavenly revelation we needed. When we gathered round Clémentine’s dinner-table with the long windows opening out of the high shabby room into the shadowy garden where we could hear during the momentary hush of our voices the note of its flutey tinkling fountain, or when we settled deep in those large worn friendly chairs before Ludovic’s fire on a winter’s night, in the cosy gloom of his overcharged bookshelves, it would come to us over and over again, like the repeated sense of a divine conviction, that this exquisite essence of human intercourse was nothing less than what we had been born for.

Jane could never have had that feeling, but we thought she shared it with us. We did not know about that deep relentless urge in Jane that was as inevitable as the rising tide. We never took seriously enough her fear of God.

And so when she went away they thought--Ludovic and Clémentine and the rest of them--“She will be here tomorrow, she will come back just as she was, and she will find us just where she left us.” And they continued to talk about her as if she had left them but an hour before to go and show herself as she was often obliged to do in some great bright hideous salon. Her chair was always there by Ludovic’s fireside, and they took account in their discussions of her probable point of view, as if she’d been there with them. There was something touching in their expectancy. There was that in their manner to remind one of the simple fidelity of peasants who lay the place of the absent one every night at table. The truth did not occur to them, and I who wanted to be deceived let their confidence communicate itself to me. I told myself that they were right, that she was bound to come back, that they had formed in her the habit of living humourously as they did, that they had given her a taste for things she would not find elsewhere, and that she would never be content to live now in that big blank new continent across the Atlantic. The word Atlantic made me shiver. I must have had a premonition; I must have known that I was going to cross it, urged out upon that cold turbulent waste of horrid water by a forlorn hope and an anguished desire to see her once more.

I hugged to myself during those days of suspense my feeling of the irresistible appeal of my city. Had Jane not told me, one day on returning from Como, that in spite of the problems her life held for her here, she experienced nevertheless each time she went away such a poignant home-sickness for Paris, its streets, its sounds, its river-banks and its buildings, that she invariably came back in a tremor of fear, positively “jumpy” at the thought that perhaps during her absence it had changed or disappeared off the map altogether? If she felt like this after a month’s sojourn in Italy, what had I now to fear I asked myself? Had we not initiated her into the very secret heart of Paris? Was there a remnant of an old and lovely building that we had not shown her, or a fragment of sculpture or a picture worth looking at to which we had not introduced her? Had she not come to feel with us the difference of the temperature and tone of the streets, the excitement of the jangling boulevards, the bland oblivion of the Place de la Concorde, the ghostliness of the Place des Vosges, the intimate provincial secretiveness of our own old peaceable quarter? Had not Ludovic called into being for her out of the embers of his fire the historic scenes that had been enacted in all these and a hundred other places? Had he not made the whole rich fantastic past of our city unroll itself before her eyes? Was it a little thing to be allowed to drink at the source of so much humanized knowledge? Where in that new country of hers would she find so fanciful and patient and tender a friend as this great scholar?

So I piled up the evidence, and then when her letter came I knew that I had foreseen the truth, and when I took them the news and they all cried out to me--“Go and bring her back, and don’t come back without her”--I knew while their high commanding voices were still sounding in my ears that already I had made up my mind to go, and I knew too, lastly and finally, that I would not be able to bring her back.

She had enclosed in her letter to me a note for them which I gave to Clémentine, who read it and passed it on. One after another they scanned its meagre lines in silence. I saw that Ludovic’s hand was shaking. When he had finished he closed his eyes for a moment and his head jerked forward. I noticed in the light of the lamp how white he had grown in the last year, and how the yellow tint of his pallor had deepened. Clémentine said looking at me--“It is not intelligible. Perhaps you can explain.” And I was given the sheet of paper covered with Jane’s large careless scrawl:

“Dear Friends,” I read, “I am not coming back. I am here alone with the ghost of my Aunt Patty in the house where I lived as a child. It is a wooden house with a verandah at the back. There are snow-drifts on the verandah. I am trying to find out what it has all been about--my life, I mean. If I believed that I would understand over there on the other side of death, then perhaps I would not be bound to stay here now, but I know that Ludovic is right, and that the hope of eternal punishment like that of immortal bliss and satisfied knowledge is just the fiction of our vanity. My punishment is on me now, since among other things I have to give you up.

“JANE.”

They had cried out at me when I told them, but after reading the letter they were silent. It was as if they had been brushed by the wings of some strange fearful messenger from another world, as if some departed spirit were present. We might all have been sitting in the dark with invisible clammy hands touching our hair, so nervous had we become. The fall of a charred log in the fireplace made us jump.

Felix forced a laugh. “The ghost of her Aunt Patty,” he mocked dismally. “Now what does she mean by that?”

“Her Aunt Patty was the person who took care of her as a child. Miss Patience Forbes her name was. She seems to have been a remarkable character. Jane often spoke of her.”

My words only added to their mystification. An old maid in America, dead now, a remarkable character. What had she to do with them? What power had she over their brilliant courageous Jane? Were they nothing that they could be replaced by the wraith of an old puritan spinster?

The room seemed to grow chilly. Some one put a fresh log on the fire. A little fitful wind was whimpering at the windows. Now and then a gust of rain pattered against the glass with a light rapid sound like finger-tips tapping. Felix had wandered away down the long dim room, his hands in his pockets, his shoulders hunched as he stood with his back to us, and his nose close to the packed shelves of books against the farther wall. The tiny gilt letterings on the old bindings glimmered faintly in the lamplight. He seemed to be searching among all those little dim signs for an explanation. Far away beyond the network of gardens and old muffling houses one heard from some distant street the hoot of a motor. From the translucent depths of gleaming glass cabinets the small mute mysterious figures of jewelled heathen gods and little bronze Buddhas and curious carved jade monsters looked out at us as if through sheets of water.

Under the aged shadowy eaves of that room, full of strange old symbols and rare books and still rarer manuscripts, where so many ideas and faiths and records had been sifted, examined and relegated to dusty recesses, its occupants remained silent, staring at the new disturbing object of their mystification. Clémentine, tucked into a corner of the sofa, her boyish head that she dyed such a bad colour, on her hand, scrutinized the tip of her foot that she held high as if for better observation, in one of her characteristic angular attitudes. Her slipper dangled loose from her toe; now and then she gave it a jerk of annoyance.

They tried to take in the meaning of what they had read. The emotional content of that scrawled page was so strange to them as to appear almost shocking. They were rather frightened. Here indeed their philosophy of laughter broke down, for they loved Jane and could not make fun of her superstitions.

“We were never hard on her. We treated her gently.”

“Even when her seriousness bored us we were patient.”

“She can’t have loved us. We have never really known her then, after all.”

Clémentine jerked about. “I was always wanting her to take lovers. She wanted me to give up mine. Poor child--we were friends all the same.”

Felix’s falsetto came down to us in a shrill wail of exasperation.

“But we never attacked her religion. We left her alone. We were good to her.”

Clémentine nodded. “Yes, we were good.”

I remembered the day I had first brought Jane to them, clothed in her silks and sables, glittering with the garish light of her millions and her high cold social activities. I had brought her straight from the preposterous palace she had let Philibert build her to this deep dim nook where we laughed and scoffed at the world she lived in. I had been nervous then. I had been afraid they would find her impossible. But they had seen through the barbarous trappings, intelligent souls that they were. Hadn’t she realized how they had honoured her? Hadn’t she known what dependable people they were?

I heard Clémentine say it again. “We were good, but she thought we were wicked because we broke the ten commandments. She thought a lot of the ten commandments.”

“It was the puritan spinster looking at us over her shoulder all the time.”

And still they pondered and puzzled, bewildered, depressed, at a loss, annoyed by their incapacity to picture to themselves even so much as the place where she was, alone at that moment. “St. Mary’s Plains, Mohican County, Michigan” was the address she gave. What an address to expect any one to take seriously. If it had been a joke the mixture of images would perhaps have conveyed something to them, but as a serious geographic sign they could do nothing with it. It had the character of a new glazed billboard, of a big glaring advertisement for some parvenu’s patent. To think of Jane sitting down away off there in the middle of a desert under it was too much for them. But the very outrageousness of the enigma helped them.

“She couldn’t do it from inclination,” some one of them said at last. “There must have been something terrible.”

Then it was that Ludovic startled us. He spoke slowly as if to himself.

“She was only beginning to learn how little conduct has to do with life. For others she had come to understand that what one does has little or no relation to what one is. I am convinced that she, poor child, is persuaded that she has committed some dreadful crime.”

But it was Clémentine who said the last word that I carried away with me.

“If she hadn’t married into your family,” she said, glaring out at me from the door of her taxi, “she would have been all right. Why, she should have chosen Philibert--”

“But, _chérie amie_, she didn’t. It was her mother who did it all.”

“Rubbish! She loved him. She loves him still.”

II

My mother was a Mirecourt. The family was of a prouder nobility than my father’s. Her people were of the _Grand Chevaux de Lorraine_. They fought with the English against the kings of France in the fourteenth century. One reads about them as fighters during several hundreds of years beginning with the Crusades. Sometimes they were on the right side, sometimes on the wrong. Later generations were not proud of the part they played in the siege of Orleans. But they were proud people and acted on caprice or in self-interest with a sublime belief in themselves. They did not like kings and were loth to give allegiance to any one. When Louis XI took away their lands, they went over to the king, but it is to be gathered from the letters of the time that they considered no king their equal. Richelieu was too much for them. He reduced them to poverty. To repair the damage the head of the family made a bourgeois marriage. They were sure of themselves in those days. Marrying money caused them no uneasiness nor fear of ridicule. My mother said one day when talking of Philibert and Jane--“We have done this sort of thing before but always with people of our own race who had a proper attitude. With foreigners one never knows.”

My father was a Breton. Anne of Brittany was the liege lady of his people. His _aieux_ were worthy gentlemen who played an obscure but on the whole respectable part in history. An occasional spendthrift appeared now and then among them to add gaiety to their monotonous lives. The spendthrifts being few and the tenacity of the others very great, they amassed a considerable fortune and were ennobled by Louis XIV: a fact of which my aunt Clothilde used occasionally to remind us. Aunt Clothilde was my father’s sister. She had made a great match in marrying the first Duke of France, but she seemed to think nothing of that nor to have any consciousness of the obligations of her class. She made fun of the legitimists, scoffed at the idea of a restoration and despised the Duc d’Orleans for the way he behaved in England. She and my mother did not get on. My mother thought her vulgar. She was, but it didn’t detract from her being a very great lady. She was always enormously fat, a greedy, wicked old thing, with a ribald mind, but with a tremendous _chic_. Philibert called her _La Gargantua_. She was Rabelaisian somehow. I liked her. She never seemed conscious of my being different from other men, and she was kinder to Jane than the others.

There were a great many others. We made a large clan. It seemed strange to Jane that half the people in Paris were our cousins or uncles or aunts. But of course it is like that. One is related to everybody.

As a family we had the reputation of having very nice manners. It was thought that we knew very well how to make ourselves agreeable and what was more characteristic, how to be disagreeable without giving offense. My mother was reputed to be the only woman in Paris who could refuse an invitation to dinner in the same house six times running without making an enemy of its mistress. My mother was perpetually penning little plaintive notes of regret. She was greatly sought after and stayed very much at home. After my father’s death it became more and more difficult to get her to go anywhere, but she liked being asked so that she could refuse. The result was that she became something precious, inapproachable, a legend of good form and grace and she remained this always. I have on my table a miniature of her painted when she was married, at the age of eighteen. She was never a beauty. A slip of a thing, gentle and pale, with dark ringlets and very bright intelligent eyes. Her power of seduction was a thing that emanated from her like a perfume, indefinable and elusive. Claire, my sister, has the same quality.

One of my mother’s special pleasures as she grew older consisted in having her dinner in bed on some grand gala evening, and telling herself that she was the only lady of any importance in Paris who had refused to be present. Sometimes on such evenings she would send for me to come and sit with her for an hour. I would find her propped up on her pillows, her eyes glowing with animation under the soft old-fashioned frill of her voluminous boudoir cap, and presently I would become aware that she was submitting me to all the play of her wit and her charm, and I would know that out of a pure spirit of contradiction she was giving me, her poor ugly duckling, the treat that she had withheld from that brilliant gathering, whether to amuse me most or herself it would be difficult to tell. We understand each other. Her manner to me was always perfect. It was a beautiful and elaborate denial of the fact that my deformity was unpleasant to her. She went to a lot of trouble to pretend that she liked having me about. If she wanted a cab called in the rain and there wasn’t a servant handy--we didn’t have too many--it was a part of her delicacy to ask me to do it rather than have me think that she had my infirmity constantly on her mind. If she required an escort to some public place she would choose me rather than Philibert, but she would not always choose me, lest I should come to feel that she forced herself to do so. She had the humblest way of asking my advice, and then when she did not take it, went to the most childlike manœuvres to deceive me and make me think she had. When I came back from school in England, I remember wondering what she would do about me and her friends. She had an evening a week and received on these occasions a number of stiff old gentlemen and gossipy dowagers, a handful of priests and all the aunts and uncles and cousins. The question for her was whether she should inflict on me the penance of talking to these people in order to show me that she liked to have me about, or whether she would let me off attendance and trust to my superior understanding to assume that I was in her eyes presentable. I believe she would have decided on the latter bolder plan, had I not taken the matter out of her hands by asking her to excuse me. Her answer was characteristic.

“But naturally, _mon enfant_. You don’t suppose that I think these old people fit company for you. Only if it’s not indiscreet, tell me sometimes about your doings. I, at least, am not too old nor yet too young to be told.”

Dear mother. She would have gone to the length of imputing to me a dozen mistresses if she had thought that would help me. And yet in spite of it all, perhaps just because of it all, I knew that the sight of me was intolerable to her. But this I feel sure was a thing that she never knew that I knew. It was a part of my business in life never to let her find it out.

My being sent to England to school had been to me a proof. Though my father had taken the decision I knew it was to get me out of my mother’s way. It was not the habit of our family to send its sons abroad for their education. Philibert had had tutors at home. None of my cousins had gone away. We were as a clan not at all given to travelling. In the extreme sensitiveness that engulfed me like an illness during a certain period of my youth, I had told myself bitterly that I was banished because they could not abide the sight of me, but my bitterness did not last, thank God; and when after my father’s death I came home to live, I set myself to matching my mother’s delicacy with my own. I arranged to convey to her the impression of being always at hand and yet I managed to be actually in her presence a minimum of time. I did things for her that I could do without being aggravatingly near her; such things as running errands and visiting her lawyer and looking after her meagre investments, accumulating these duties while at the same time I withdrew more and more from sharing in her social activities.

I had kept, for reasons of economy and in order to be near her, my apartment in a wing of her house over the porter’s lodge, in that part of the building that screened the house from the street. My windows looked on the one side across the street into some gardens and on the other side into our court yard. From my dressing-room I had a view of my mother’s graceful front door with the wide shallow steps before it and the gravel expanse of the inner carriage drive. Sometimes when I came home in the evening, Madame Oui, the _concierge’s_ wife, would tap on the glass in her door that was just opposite my own little entrance behind the great double portals that barred us into our stronghold, and would tell me that my mother had come in and would like to see me. Or I would find a note bidding me come to her lying on my table. She wrote me a great number of notes, sprightly amusing missives that reminded one of the fact that Frenchwomen have been for centuries mistresses in the art of letter-writing. They gave me the news, recounted the latest family gossip, contained tips as to how to behave if I came across an aunt who owed her money, or an uncle who had lent her some, warned me against this or that person whom she did not want to see any more, asked me to pay a call on one of her ancient followers who was in bed with a cold, enclosed a tiresome bill that she hadn’t the money to pay immediately, or implored me in witty phrases of complaint to use my influence with Philibert and try to get him away from some woman: in all of which matters I did my best to meet her wishes save as regarded my brother. “My influence with Philibert” was one of my mother’s least successful fictions. I wonder even now that she kept it up. I suppose it would have seemed to her shocking to admit even tacitly that her two sons never spoke to each other if they could help it. Yet she must have known that although he lived nominally in my mother’s house up to the time of his marriage I scarcely ever saw him unless at a distance in some crowded salon. The few mutual friends we possessed never asked us to dinner or lunch together, and strangely enough in the one place where we might often have happened to come across one another, that is in my mother’s own boudoir, we never did meet. My mother must have managed this. She must have manœuvred to prevent such encounters. She arranged to see us always separately and yet continued to talk to us, each to the other, as if she supposed that beyond her door we were amusing ourselves together, thick as thieves.

She would say--“I hear this latest friend of Philibert’s whom he has so made the mode this year, is really quite pretty. Tell me what she looks like,”--assuming me to be perfectly aware of this affair. Or--“Your brother’s new tailor is not successful at all. He gives him the most exaggerated shoulders. Fifi is not tall enough to stand it. I wish you would get him to go back to the old one.” Or even--“Tell me what your brother is up to. I never see him.” As if I knew what Philibert was up to.

My rare meetings with him took place at my sister’s. She used sometimes to have us at her house together. Her husband would bring him home to lunch unexpectedly, or I would drop in unbidden and find him there. Poor Claire had married the biggest automobile works in the country, and had been taken to Neuilly and shut up there in a gigantic villa. She was finding that it tasked her philosophical docility to the utmost to meet the demands of the uxorious individual who paid all her bills from his own cheque book and was generous only in the way of supplying her with babies. She had had four in six years, and her health was a source of anxiety to my mother, who was frankly exasperated by the turn her daughter’s affairs had taken.

“My dear,” she said to me one night on her return from Neuilly, “I supposed that that man had married Claire to get into society, and now that I’ve given her to him he has taken her off to the wilderness. I don’t know what to make of it. The poor child is wasting away. He simply never leaves her alone. They go to bed together every night at ten o’clock. It is horrible.”

Claire may have bemoaned her lot to my mother in those long tête-à-têtes of theirs, but she never complained to me, nor did she, I believe, to Philibert, who was in the habit of borrowing money from her large, oily, sleek-headed husband. She had some of my mother’s mannerisms, her little way of quickly moving her head backwards with the slightest toss; the same light flexible utterance; the same sigh and sudden droop of irrepressible languor. I believe her to be the only person of whom Philibert was ever unselfishly fond. She pleased him. Her physical frailty, appealed to his taste which was in reality so fastidious, however vulgar some of his amusements might be, and her mocking spirit was congenial to him. When one thought of Claire one thought of her dark shadowed eyes with the deep circles under them marking the tender cheeks, and her truly beautiful smile. She was a collection of odd beauties combined in a way to make one’s heart ache, but there was something sharp in her--something hurting. Lovely Claire, cynical siren, how caressingly she spoke to me, how she drew out of my heart its tenderness, and how often she disappointed me. Not brave enough to be happy, far too intelligent not to know what she was missing, she took refuge in self-mockery and when faced with a crisis subsided into complete passivity.

One evening in the early summer, more than twenty years ago now, I found a note from my mother tucked in the crack of my door asking me to come to her at once as she had news for me of the utmost importance. I found my sister with her, and something in the attitude of the two women, who were so closely akin as to reproduce each one the same physical pose under the stress of a deep preoccupation, conveyed to me a suspicion that Philibert had that moment skipped out through the long open window. They sat, each in a high brocaded chair, their heads thrown back against their respective cushions, their hands limp in their laps and their eyes half-closed. I thought for an instant that both had fainted. My mother was the first to make a sign. She lifted an arm and in silence pointed a finger at a chair for me.

“Your brother,” she said, when once I was seated, “has sold this house over my head. He is going to be married.”

“To a little American girl,” breathed Claire.

“The fortune is immense,” added my mother.

“The daughter of that awful smart Mrs. Carpenter,” said Claire, opening wide her eyes the better to take in the horror.

“She asked me three times to luncheon,” said my mother. “I have never seen her.”

I looked from one to the other--“But if the fortune is immense--” I ventured.

“It is all tied up,” wailed my mother. “Her trustees insist on his debts being paid beforehand. I understand nothing--but nothing.” Her head dropped forward. She pressed her thumb and forefinger against her worn eyelids. She began to cry.

Claire, with a strange sidelong look at her expressive of compassion and exasperation and wonder, got up and walked to the window and stood with her back to us looking out into the garden.

“I should have thought my son-in-law would have saved me this humiliation,” said my mother, fumbling with her left hand for her handkerchief. “But Claire says he has already lent Philibert very considerable sums.” I saw my sister’s slender figure stiffen. “What curious people Americans are. It seems that the father made such a will as passes belief. The child comes into the entire fortune but can only dispose of the income. The mother has an annuity, Claire says it must be a big one as she entertains a great deal. Why did you not tell me your brother was getting so dreadfully into debt? The girl is just eighteen. It appears that in America girls reach their majority at eighteen. Her name is Jane. A most unpleasant name. Philibert says she is not pretty. These _mésalliances_ are so tiresome. If only he could have married that exquisite little Bianca. I shall be obliged to receive the mother. I am sure she has a very strong accent.”

My poor mother stretched out her hand to me. “What is to become of us?” she wailed gently. I felt very sorry for her. I understood that she was afraid of the invasion of a horde of big noisy strangers. I tried to comfort her. She seemed to me for the first time pitiful, and I saw that her youthfulness was after all, just one of the illusions she cast by the exercise of her will. It fell from her that evening as if it had been some gossamer veil destroyed by her tears.

Claire remained silent. Only once during all my mother’s broken lament did she speak, and then she said without turning--“I should have thought one such marriage in a family was enough.”

It transpired that Philibert needed five hundred thousand francs to put him straight, that the house was being sold for a million and that the remaining half was my mother’s, since they owned the property between them. He had brought her the deed of sale to sign that afternoon, and had gone away with the signature in his pocket. She said--“Naturally I could not refuse. It is not as if he could have sold half the building.”

I felt humiliated for my mother. It seemed to me that my brother had injured her in a most offensive way. There was a kind of indecency about the proceeding that made me ashamed. It was the kind of thing I had hoped we were none of us capable of doing. He was taking away from her not only her shelter and security, but a part of her own personality. It was as outrageous as if he had forced her to cut off her hair and had taken it round to a wigmaker to turn into a handful of gold. I saw that without that fine old house, so like her own self expressed in architecture, with its bland and graceful exterior and delicate ornamented rooms, she would lose a vital part of her entity. She was not one of those people whose public and private selves are distinct. The proud little bright-eyed lady who drove out of those stately doors in her brougham to dispense finely gradated smiles to the meticulously selected people of her acquaintance, and the passionate intriguing mother so given to subterfuges of kindness and ineffable make-believe of disinterested affection, were one and the same person. She had no special manner for the world. There was no homely naturalness for her to subside into, no loose woolly dressing-gown of conduct and no rough carpet slippers of laziness to don in the presence of her family or by her lonely self. What she was when in attendance on the Bourbons that she was in her own silent bedroom. Even about her weeping there was a certain style. Her tears were pitiful but not ugly. They had destroyed the illusion of her youthfulness, but they had not marred her elegance. There was measure and appropriateness and dramatic worth in her weeping. Her son had not broken her heart or her spirit; he had merely dragged off some of her clothing. She stood denuded, impoverished, a little shrunken in stature, that was all. It was that that enraged me. I said--“What a brute.” My mother pulled me up sharply.

“My son,” she said to me, with more of haughtiness than I had ever seen in her manner to any one of us. “I have consented to do what your brother has asked. I have approved of his conduct. That is sufficient.”

I felt then the finality, the hopelessness. I believe I smiled. The change was sudden. It had always been like that with mother. She might complain of Philibert but no one could criticize him to her.

“Ah, well,” I said, “if you have made up your mind to accept her--”

Mother lifted her head quickly. “Whom?”

“Your new daughter-in-law.”

I am almost sure that she turned pale. I cannot have imagined it. Her words too, gave me the same painful impression.

“I have accepted it, not her, as yet.”

And suddenly I thought of the girl, Jane Carpenter, whom I had not yet laid eyes on, with an immense pity.

“Yes,” said Claire, coming back to us, and looking at us with her least charming, most bitterly mocking air. “We prepare a nice welcome for her. I wonder how she will like us.”

But my mother had the last word.

“We shall, I presume, know how to make ourselves agreeable,” she said, putting away her handkerchief into her little silk bag. I saw that she would shed no more tears over the girl, Jane Carpenter.

III

Mrs. Carpenter was an American who apologized for her own country. She had found it incapable of providing a sufficient field of activity for her social talents and called it crude. The phrase on her lips was funny. There was much about her that was funny, since one could not in the face of her bright brisk self-satisfaction call her pathetic.

The flattery of such migrations as hers is mystifying to Parisians like myself, who know that our city is the most delightful place in the world, but do not quite understand why so many foreigners like Mrs. Carpenter should find it so. She seemed to derive an immense satisfaction from the fact that she lived in Paris. But why? Where lay the magic difference between her Paris and her New York? She had established herself in a large bright apartment in the Avenue du Bois de Bologne. Her rent was high, her furniture expensive, her table lavish, her motor had pale grey cushions and silver trimmings. All these things she could have had in New York. She might have paid a little more for them over there, but that would only have added to her pleasure. She liked to pay high prices for things. It may be that I am doing her an injustice. There were moments when her indefatigable pursuit of us all filled me with scornful pity and made me think that she did hide under her breezy successful manner a wistful and romantic admiration for things that were foreign and old, and a touching respect for things she did not understand. She once told me that she had wanted to take an old hotel in our quarter, something with atmosphere and a history and old-world charm. But somehow she had not found what she wanted. The houses she saw were dark and gloomy and insanitary. They were wonderfully romantic but they had no bathrooms. She had wanted one in particular, had wanted it awfully, but the owner had insisted on staying on in little rooms under the roof, which meant his using her front stairs, so at last she had given up the idea. Her apartment was certainly not gloomy. It glittered with gold--golden walls, gold plate, gilt chairs. She ended by liking it immensely, but was sometimes a little ashamed of being so pleased with it. Perhaps, at odd moments, she called it crude.

I used to go there sometimes, long before Jane came to Paris. I am sorry now that I did. Had I known Mrs. Carpenter was going to be, for me, Jane’s mother, I would not have gone. It is not nice to remember that I used to make fun of Jane’s mother, and accept her hospitality with amused contempt. We all did. She was to us an object of good-humoured derision. Poor old Izzy. She fed us so well; she begged us so continually to come. She seemed to derive such pleasure from hearing the butler announce our names. I am sure she believed that awful flat of hers to be the social centre of a very distinguished society. The more of a mixture the better to her mind:--Austrians, Hungarians, Poles,--she liked having princes about, and their dark furtive eyes and beautifully manicured hands filled her with joy. It was only after Philibert got hold of her that she began to understand that perhaps, after all, too cosmopolitan a salon was not quite the thing. Philibert took her in hand. He had learned somehow about Jane. He already had his idea.

And now I come upon a curious problem. I find that two distinct Mrs. Carpenters exist in my mind, and I cannot reconcile them. One was a beautiful romantic creature whom Jane--far away in the Grey House in St. Mary’s Plains--called mother and wrote to once a week and loved with a pure flame of loyalty; the other was Izzy Carpenter, whose loud voice and tall elastic fashionable figure was so well-known in Paris: Busy Izzy, who was run by Philibert, and a group of young ne’er-do-weels. I find it very difficult to realize that this jolly slangy woman, with curly grey hair and a blue eye that could give a broad wink on occasion, was identical with the figure of poetry Jane dreamed about night after night in her little restless cot at the foot of her Aunt Patty’s four-poster bed. It is disturbing to think that even about this decided hard-edged vivacious woman there should have been such a difference of opinion, such a contrast of received impressions as to make one wonder whether she had any corporeal existence at all. I think of that stern humorous spinster Patience Forbes comforting the child who was always asking questions about her mother; I think of her taking the aching young thing on her gaunt knees in the old rocking chair with its knitted worsted cushion, and lulling that troubled eager mind to rest with stories of her mother’s childhood.

I can see the grim face of Patience Forbes while she searches her memory for pleasant things about her heartless prodigal sister. She sits in a bay window looking out into the back garden where there is a sleepy twittering of birds. The trams thunder past up Desmoine’s Avenue. The milkman comes up the path; the white muslin curtains billow into the peaceful room that smells of lavender and mint. There is sunlight on the old mahogany. Jane’s great-grandmother, in an oval frame, looks down insipidly, her eyes mildly shining between the low bands of her parted hair. And Jane has her arms round her Aunt Patty, and her face, so unlike the gentle portrait, is troubled and brooding, a sullen ugly little face with something strange, half wild, that recalls her father and frightens the good woman who holds her close and goes on answering questions about her sister Isabel. And then I think of Mrs. Carpenter not as Jane’s mother, but as the daughter of old Mrs. Forbes of the Grey House, and I am again bewildered. Those people in St. Mary’s Plains, Jane’s grandmother, her aunts and her uncle, were people of sense and character and taste. Who that knew Izzy Carpenter would have thought it? Who that knew Jane could deny it? I suspect Mrs. Carpenter of having been ashamed of them. Jane’s loyalty saved her from any such stupidity.

When I went to St. Mary’s Plains the other day, Jane showed me, on the wall of her uncle’s study, an old print representing the first log cabin of the French settler who had come there across the Canadian border in 1780. In the picture a Red Indian carrying a tomahawk and capped with feathers skulks behind the trees at the edge of the clearing, and in the foreground a group of Noah’s Ark cattle are guarded by a man with a gun. Under the print is written--“St. Marie les Plaines,” and the signature “Gilbert de Chevigné.” It was a Monsieur de Chevigné from Quebec, Jane told me, who built the Grey House. The name had been corrupted to Cheney; the Cheneys were her grandmother’s people. Many of the families in St. Mary’s Plains traced a similar history. The town in growing had cherished the story of its French foundation and its social element had grown to believe that it had a special sympathy with our country. Its well-to-do people were constantly coming from and going to France. With an indifference bordering on contempt, and an ease that suggested the consciousness of special claims and opportunities, they would cross the really tremendous expanse of territory that lay between their thresholds and the Atlantic sea-board, ignoring the existence of Chicago, Buffalo, Boston, Philadelphia and New York, and set sail for Cherbourg. It was considered a perfectly natural occurrence and one scarcely worthy of self-congratulation for a girl from St. Mary’s Plains to marry a foreigner of real or supposed distinction, but those who neither married abroad nor at home, but were led astray by the vulgar attraction of some rich man from the far west or east were the subject of pitying criticism. Such had been the case with Jane’s mother. Silas Carpenter had come bearing down on St. Mary’s Plains, a wild man from the great west; like a bison or a moose breaking into a mild and pleasant paddock. Isabel Forbes, headstrong, discontented, covetous, had fallen to his savage charm, his millions and the peculiar oppressive magnetism of his silence, that seemed filled with the memories of unspeakable experiences. The first rush to the goldfields of California loomed in the background of his untutored childhood. Later he had gone to the Klondike. Gold--he had dug it out of the earth with his own great hands. Then he had taught himself oddly from books. A speculator, a gambler, he had a passion for music, and played the flute. A strange mixture. To please Isabel’s family he gave up poker, went to church, was married in a frock-coat. People said he had Indian blood in his veins. It seems possible. He had the long head and slanting profile and the mild voice characteristic of the race. Society in St. Mary’s Plains was genuinely sorry for Isabel’s family when she married him. But she went away to New York to live and was forgotten until on Silas’ sensational death her departure for Paris revived interest in her doings.

“The Grey House” as it was known in St. Mary’s Plains, had the benevolent patriarchal air of a small provincial manor. Built sometime in the seventies it had not had too many coats of paint during its lifetime, and its calm exterior with the double row of comfortable windows each flanked by a pair of shutters was weather-stained and worn like the visage of some bland unconcerned person of distinction who is not ashamed to look in his old age a little like a weather-beaten peasant. It stood well back from the street in the centre of a wide plot of ground not large enough to be called a park, though containing a few nice trees. The lawn indeed merged in the most sociable way into the grounds of other neighbouring houses and ran smoothly down in front to the edge of the public side-walk where there was no wall or railing of any kind. A scarcely noticeable sign beside the path that led from the street to the front porch with its two wooden pillars said “Keep off the grass.”

There were only two storeys to the Grey House and a garret with dormer windows in the grey shingled roof, the rooms of the ground floor being raised only a foot or two from the level of the street, so that Jane’s grandmother, sitting in her armchair by the living-room window could look up over the tops of her spectacles and see and recognize her acquaintances who often even at that comfortable distance would bow or lift their hats to the little old lady as they passed.

Every one in St. Mary’s Plains knew the Grey House. When one of the Misses Forbes went shopping, she would say “Send it to the Grey House, please,” and the young man in the dry goods’ store would answer--“Certainly, Miss Forbes, it’ll be right along. Mrs. Forbes is keeping well, I hope? Let me see, it’s ten years since I was in her Sunday-school class.” And Miss Minnie--it was usually Minnie who did the shopping--would smile kindly at the chatty young man who certainly did not mean any harm.

The occupants of that house were people content to stay at home, who did not always know what day of the month it was, and who found a deep source of well-being in the realization that tomorrow would be like today. I imagine those gentlewomen doing the same thing in the same way year after year, wearing the same clothes made by the same family dressmaker, and opposing to the disturbing menace of events the quiet obstinacy of their contentment. I watch them at night go up the stairs together at ten o’clock, kiss one another at the door of their mother’s room and go down the dim corridor, Patty staying behind like a sentinel under the gas-jet, her bony arm lifted, waiting to turn the light still lower once they were safe behind their own closed doors. Jane in her bed used to hear their voices saying, “Good-night, mother dear, pleasant dreams. Good-night, Minnie. Good-night.” And if the man of the house, Jane’s Uncle Bradford, were at his club playing whist, Beth, from the rosy interior of her cretonne chamber would be sure to call out--“I left the front door on the latch for Brad. I suppose it’s all right.” And Patience would say--“Who would burgle this house?” And Minnie would add--“I put his glass of milk in his room.” And then there would be silence disturbed only by the sound of footsteps moving to and fro behind closed doors. And Jane would wait drowsily for Aunt Patty to come in and say “Good gracious, child, not asleep yet? It’s past ten o’clock.”

To the Forbes family the doings of the outer world were a pleasant distant spectacle that interested and amused but made them feel all the happier to be where they were. When a letter arrived from Izzy bearing its Paris postmark, they would read it together, become pleasantly animated over the news and then settle down with relief at the thought that they didn’t have to go over there and do all those things. The letter would then be added to a package bound with an elastic band and put away in the secretary until some one came to call and asked how Isabel was getting on.

I seem to see them all, on these occasions, sitting there in their habitual attitudes. I imagine the little grandmother, with the letter open in her black silk lap, adjusting her spectacles on the slender bridge of her arched nose, and Jane on a footstool beside her, waiting to listen once more with absorbing interest to the extracts from her mother’s letter that she already knew by heart, and the two or three friends sitting round rather primly on the old mahogany chairs, and Aunt Beth with her embroidery on the horsehair sofa, and Aunt Minnie making the tea, and Aunt Patty teaching one of her birds to eat from her lips at the window, and perhaps Uncle Bradford, who has come home from his office, visible across the hall through the door in his study with some weighty volume on his knees, and a good cigar between his lips. I seem to hear the purring song of the tea kettle and the pleasant sound of voices calling one another intimate names. I see the faded carpet with its dimmed white pattern and the stiff green brocaded curtains in their high gilt cornices, and the pleasant mixture of heterogeneous objects selected for use and comfort. I have in my nostrils the perfume of roses opening out in the warmth of the room, and of the newly baked cakes made for tea by Aunt Minnie, and still another finer perfume, the faint fresh fragrance of the spirit of that little old lady who ruled the house in gentleness and was beloved in the town. A humourous little old lady who was not afraid of death, and believed in the clemency of a Divine Father. She liked Jane to read aloud to her while she knitted,--Trollope, Charles Lamb, Robert Burns, were her favourites, and she enjoyed a good tune on the piano, and would beat time with her knitting needles when Beth played a waltz. But on Sundays Beth played hymns and the servants came in after supper to sing with the family “Rock of Ages,” “Jesus Lover of my Soul,” “Abide with Me.” Jane liked those Sunday evenings. They made her feel so safe, was the way she put it.

All the inmates of the Grey House were God-fearing but Minnie was the most religious. She had a talent for cooking and a craving for emotional religious experience. The kitchen of the Grey House was a very pleasant place with a window that gave onto the back verandah, and often on summer mornings Aunt Beth who was young and pretty, would take her sewing out onto this back porch while Aunt Minnie in the kitchen was making cakes, and they would talk through the open window with Jane curled up in the hammock beside Beth’s work-table. Beth, would call out in her very high small voice that expressed her plaintive dependence and blissful confidence in the protected life she so utterly loved--“Minnie, Minnie!” and the sound of the egg-beater in the kitchen would cease, and Aunt Minnie would call through the open window in her lower, deeper tone--

“Yes, what do you say?”

“I forgot to tell you that Mrs. Blatchford asked me if I’d ask you to make six cakes for the Woman’s Exchange Fourth of July Sale.”

And Aunt Minnie would exclaim--

“Good gracious. Six angel cakes, that makes thirty-six eggs.” While beating up the whites of eggs for her famous cakes Minnie would ponder on the power of mind over matter, the healing of physical pain by faith, and the ultimate purifying grace of the Divine Spirit. One day she announced that she had joined the Christian Science Church. The family took the news seriously. Jane’s grandmother turned very white. She leaned back in her chair and closed her eyes and whispered--“Oh, Minnie dear, I’m so sorry.” Uncle Bradford brought his fist down on a table with a crash and shouted--“Don’t you do it, Minnie. These newfangled religions are no good.” Beth wept. Patience said “Hmph.”

Jane didn’t like the new look on her Aunt Minnie’s face, but the religious mystery behind it had a worrying fascination. She listened to the talk of her elders hoping to learn about this new faith, but it was characteristic of them not to argue or discuss things that affected them deeply, so she learned little, and she was afraid to ask her Aunt Patience who seemed somehow not at all patient with Minnie just now. So she was reduced to talking it all over with Fan, her friend, who lived next door. They would sit astride the fence that divided the two back gardens and talk about God and their elders.

“Aunt Minnie has got a new religion,” Jane announced. “Religions are funny things. I don’t think I like them but they do do things to you.”

“Pooh! I know. It’s not half so queer as Mormons and Theosophites and Dowyites.”

“What’s all that?”

“The Mormons have lots of wives. They live in Salt Lake City and practice bigamy. The Dowyites are in Chicago. There’s a big church there full of crutches of all the lame people Dowy has cured by miracle.”

“Well, Aunt Minnie says there’s no such thing as being lame or sick, and everything is a miracle.”

“He-he! I’m not a miracle”

“Yes, you are.”

“No, I’m not.”

“Who made you?”

“My mother.”

“How?”

“I dunno.”

“Well, that’s a miracle.”

“Oh, Jane, you are a silly.”

“I’m not silly. I know you’ve got to have a religion or you can’t be good, but I don’t like it all the same.”

“Who wants to be good?”

“I do.”

“Why?”

“Because I’d be afraid to die.”

Fan had a complete worldly wisdom that could cover most things, but she was obliged to admit, though with her nose in the air, that she, too, would be afraid to die if she went on being very bad up to the last minute.

Fan Hazeltine was an orphan. She lived with a stepfather who hated her and sometimes didn’t speak to her for a week. She and Jane had met on the back fence the day after Jane’s arrival in St. Mary’s Plains. Jane was six years old then, Fan eight, but I imagine that Fan was very much the same at that time, as when I met her twenty years later. She was always a wisp of a thing no bigger than an elf with a wizened face. Life gave her no leisure for expansion. She was one of those people who never had a chance to blossom out, but could just achieve the phenomenal business of continuing to exist by grit and the determination not to be downed. What she was in her stepfather’s inimical house that she remained in the larger inimical world, a small under-nourished undaunted creature, consumed with a thirst for happiness, hiding her hurts under an obstinate gaiety, a minute lonely thing steering her bark cleverly through stormy waters, keeping afloat somehow, sinking and struggling, her grim little heart hardening, her laughter growing shriller and louder as the years went by. There is no difficulty about understanding Fan. I can see her astride that fence, screwing up her face while she told Jane what she was going to do in the world, and I can see her set about doing it.

“I’m going to have a good time. You wait. You just wait. I tell you I’m going to have a good time--fun, fun, fun. That’s what I want.”

But Jane did not say what she wanted from life.

IV

Patience Forbes was a woman of science, an ornithologist. When she died years ago she was recognized in America as one of the foremost authorities on birds. I remember her death. Jane got the news in Paris. It was at the time of the final struggle over Geneviève’s marriage. She showed me her Aunt Patience’s will. It read:--“To my beloved niece Jane Carpenter now known by the name of the Marquise de Joigny, I leave the Grey House and everything in it except my collections and manuscripts. These I leave to the Museum of St. Mary’s Plains. But the house and all the furniture I leave to Jane in case she may some day want some place to go.”

Jane looked at me with strange eyes that day.

“Isn’t it queer,” she said. “How could she have known?”

But I understand now that Patience Forbes was the only one who did know. She must have been a shrewd woman. She must have followed Jane in her mind all those years, with extraordinary accuracy considering the little she had to go on. But she never betrayed her misgivings. There is only that sentence in her will to indicate what she thought.

She was an imposing woman, plain of face, careless of her appearance and masculine in build. Her nose was crooked, her neck scrawny and her hands large and bony. But she had an air of grandeur. When she tramped through the woods or across the open country that surrounded St. Mary’s Plains, her field glasses and her camera slung across her shoulder, she had in spite of her quaint bonnet and long black clothes the look of a grizzled amazon. She would walk twenty miles in a day and frequently did so. Many of the farmers round about knew her. They called her “the bird lady” and asked her in to their kitchens for a glass of milk and a slice of apple-pie, and often while sitting there with her bonnet strings untied and her dusty skirt turned up on her knees, she would receive gifts from sun-burned urchins who, knowing the object of her pilgrimages would bring to her in the battered straw crowns of their hats, rare birds’ eggs that they had discovered in the high branches of trees or the secret fastnesses of tangled thickets.

She was the dominating personality in her own home. Her mother and sisters were a little afraid of her. When her brother Bradford married and she announced that she was going to hold classes in the parlour of the Grey House and charge for them, they dared not object, although they would have preferred going without the comforts that Bradford’s shared income had provided rather than have a lot of strange people invading the house.

It was characteristic of the family that they never spoke to Jane of money and never gave her any idea that she was or ever would be an heiress. She made her own bed in the morning, and sometimes if she were not in too much of a hurry to get off to school she helped Aunt Minnie with the others. On Saturday mornings she darned her own stockings, or tried to, sitting on a low chair beside her grandmother, but this was by way of a lesson in keeping quiet. I am afraid she took it as a matter of course that Aunt Beth and her grandmother should mend her clothes for her.

She gave a great deal of trouble. Not only was she always getting into scrapes, but she was subject as well to storms of passion that sometimes, as she realized later, seriously frightened her grandmother. Her accidents--she had a great many little ones and one at least that was serious--were episodes marked in her memory as rather pleasant occasions that procured for her an extra amount of petting. There was a high bookcase at the top of the stairs in a dark corner of the upper hall, full of old and faded volumes. Here she spent hours together on Sunday afternoons, sitting on the top of a step-ladder that she dragged out of the housemaids’ cupboard. One day, finding among those dusty little books a copy of Dante’s “Vita Nuova,” she became so absorbed in the lovely poem, though it was only a lame translation in English verse, that she began chanting the lines to herself, unconsciously swaying backwards and forwards on her perch, until all at once the ladder gave way beneath her, and she fell to the floor, breaking her arm. The days that followed were among the happiest of her life. She was installed in her Uncle Bradford’s room that gave out onto the sunny back garden where a pear tree was in bloom. There, propped up in the middle of the great white bed, her arm in a sling and not hurting too much to spoil her voluptuous sense of her own importance, she seemed to herself a romantic figure, and received Fan with benevolent superiority, while deeply and deliciously she drank in with every feverish throb of her passionate little heart the tender devotion of the patient women who loved her. Her Aunt Patty slept on a cot beside her at night; her Aunt Minnie brought her meals to her on the daintiest of trays; her grandmother and her Aunt Beth came with their sewing to sit with her in the afternoon. Often when she felt herself dropping into a doze after lunch, before finally closing her eyes to give herself up to the sleep that was creeping over her so softly, she would for the pleasure of it open them again to look through her heavy eyelids at her grandmother’s head that she could see above the foot of the great bed outlined against the sunny light of the window; and she would see the little old lady lift a finger to her pursed lips and nod mysteriously smiling at Beth and glance towards the bed as much as to say--“The child is dropping off, we mustn’t make a sound.” And the child, with such a sense of security and peace as to convey to her in after years the memory of a heavenly instant, would let herself float blissfully out into the still waters of oblivion, knowing that she would surely find them there when she awoke.

She was given the book, “La Vita Nuova” for her own, and lay in bed dreaming of a poet who would one day love her as Dante had loved his Beatrice.

It was about this time that Mrs. Carpenter began working out her schemes with Philibert.

Jane was according to her own testimony subject to fits of such violent temper that she scarcely knew what she was doing. At such moments she frightened every one round her and herself as well. One evening stands out in her memory as peculiarly dreadful. The family were gathered in the drawing room before supper waiting for her, when she burst in on them, her face as white as a sheet, and flung herself on her Aunt Patty with the words--“I’ve killed a boy. Come quick. He was torturing a beast. He’s out in the garden lying quite still.” And shuddering from head to foot she dragged her aunt out after her. The boy was not dead, but lay as a matter-of-fact unconscious on the path near the back gate. Jane had knocked him down and half throttled him. There had been three boys shooting with sling shots at a lame cat to whose leg they had tied a tin can so that the wretched beast could not get out of range. Jane had seen them from the window and had rushed to the rescue. The affair made something of a stir in the town. It got into the papers. The boy had to be taken to a hospital. Jane’s Uncle Bradford needed all his influence to avert a public scandal. Unfortunately it was not the first case of Jane’s violence that had come to the knowledge of the neighbours. People talked of her as “that savage girl of Izzy’s” and told their children they were not to play with her any more. She was taken out of school for a time.

It is difficult to get at the exact meaning of this story. All that I know is what Jane has told me herself, and she may have exaggerated its social importance. At any rate, to her own mind it was an immense and horrible disgrace. She felt herself a monstrosity, and for weeks could not bear to go into the street. Her Aunt Patience too, had taken a very serious view of the affair. She sent for Jane to come to her in her study the next morning; the child was, I suppose, too nervous and shaken that night to listen to anything in the way of reprimand, and Aunt Patience showed her a riding whip on a peg in the corner against the wall. It was a cowboy quirt, a braided leather thing with a long lash.

“Jane,” said her Aunt Patty, “that quirt belonged to your father. He left it here once long ago. It is yours. I have put it there on that peg for you. I am giving it to you for a special purpose. When a dreadful act is committed against a human being, some one has to suffer, to make things equal. Usually the one who does the evil deed is punished, but I can’t, Jane, punish you like that.” And here Aunt Patty’s stern voice quavered. “I can’t because I can’t bear to. You are my child. I love you too much. I have lain awake all night thinking about it. When God is angry he punishes people he loves. He has the right. He is wise and perfect. But I am not in the place of God to you, and I can’t do it. I am going to do something quite different. I am going to do it because something has got to be done, some one has got to suffer for what you have done. You are to take that whip down now from that peg and give me three lashes with it across my shoulders. I am going to take your punishment on me because I think that will make you understand. Do as I say.”

The child was terrified. In a kind of trance she took the leather weapon in her shaking hands. Her aunt stood straight and still in the middle of the room. “Do what I say, Jane,” she commanded again. Her voice was awful. Jane advanced a step towards her as if hypnotized, looked a long moment at the stern face, then suddenly collapsed in a heap at those large plain feet in their worn flat slippers.

“I can’t, Aunt Patty,” she whispered. “I can’t! It’s enough. It’s enough.”

After this Jane spent more and more time in her aunt’s company. The dreadful experience drew them even closer together. Jane would almost always accompany her aunt on her long tramps into the country, and although as Patience so often said she never took any real interest in the science of birds, she nevertheless became an adept at climbing trees and going through thickets, and learned to imitate the songs of birds in an astonishing way. This accomplishment indeed, she never lost; even when she had long since forgotten all she learned about Baltimore Orioles and Brown Thrushes and Scarlet Tanagers and the migrations of birds in the spring time, and their marvellous intricate manner of fabricating their nests, she could throw back her head and fill the room wherever she might be with the most bewildering joyous riot of warblings and twitterings and liquid trills. She became so expert at this that sometimes she would play pranks on her aunt, and climbing into the tree outside the study window, she would imitate the song of some little feathered creature so perfectly that her Aunt Patty would leave her work and tip-toe softly to the window only to be greeted with a squeal of triumphant laughter.

The classes in bird lore that were held in the parlour were for Jane little more than a chance of giggling with Fan in a corner. The lectures indoors went on during the winter, but in the spring and early summer Miss Forbes took her followers by train to a village on the edge of the forest, and there, in the leafy fastnesses of those sunny enclosed spaces would give her pupils demonstrated lectures. Jane has told me that when following the sound of a bird’s note heard overhead at a distance, her aunt’s face would become transfigured; a little mystic smile would come over her plain features; she would sign to her throng to make not the slightest noise, and silently her head bent sideways and upwards, she would lead the way, stopping now and then, her finger on her lips, to listen for the clear note that guided her, until at last she would catch sight of her beauty, high up on a swaying leafy bough, and all her being would strain upward towards that tiny creature, and her face would light up with even a brighter joy, and she would point a gaunt finger mutely at the object of her worship as if calling attention to some lovely little celestial being. Then if some one, as was always the case, made a sound and the bird flew away, a shadow would fall on her face, her pose would relax and she would turn to the heavy human beings about her, a dull disappointed glance, looking at them all for a moment in deep reproach before she recollected what she was there for, and began to tell them of the habits and customs of the songster who had just disappeared over the treetops.

On one occasion Fan went so far as to say these rambles were ridiculous, and Jane flared up at once.

“My Aunt Patty ridiculous?” she cried out. “How dare you? She’s the greatest ornithologist in the world, and I love her, I love her more than all the outside world together and everything in it.”

When Jane was fifteen her grandmother died, and a year later her Aunt Beth was married, and Jane, who was sixteen, had a white organdie bridesmaid’s dress and carried a bouquet of pink roses, and after that Aunt Minnie went away to be a Christian Science healer in New York, and Jane was left alone in the Grey House with her Aunt Patty.

Her grandmother’s death left her with no impression of horror. The little old lady had gone to sleep one day quietly in her accustomed place by the window and had not wakened again, that was all. Aunt Patty at the funeral in a long black veil, looked like some grand and austere monument of grief, reminding her vaguely of a statue she had seen somewhere of emblematic and national importance, but she made no fuss over her sorrow, and told the child that night of her own mother’s imminent arrival from Paris.

This was a piece of news sufficiently wonderful to offset completely the effect of death in the house. Jane said to herself, “She is coming to take me away to be with her at last.” And she went up and hid in her room so that her Aunt Patty should not see how excited she was.

But Jane was mistaken. Such was not Mrs. Carpenter’s intention. She had come to America on receiving her sister’s telegram partly out of deference to her mother’s memory, partly to consult her lawyers, and partly for the purpose of putting Jane in a fashionable American boarding school. The sadness in Jane’s memory long connected with those days has little to do with her grandmother’s funeral, but is the lasting indelible impression of the discovery she made then, that her mother did not like her.

Mrs. Carpenter came out with her ideas for her daughter abruptly on the evening of her arrival. She had no idea that her daughter adored her. Jane’s letters beginning “My darling Mummy” and ending “Your loving daughter” had conveyed to her nothing of the writer’s emotion. No doubt they bored her, and no doubt she supposed that they bored the child who was obliged to write them. It would probably have seemed to her incredible that a little girl who scarcely ever saw her should go on wanting her for ten years from a distance of a couple of thousand miles. If she justified herself to herself at all, I suppose she made use of this argument: “Well, if I don’t care for her because she is so dreadfully her father’s daughter, then that proves that I am too different for her ever to care for me. The best thing for us both is to leave her with people who won’t let her get on their nerves as she would on mine.”

Mrs. Carpenter was not subtle, and she hated wasting time, so she opened the subject at once sitting with Patience in the back parlour, her slim silk-stockinged legs crossed easily, one smart foot dangling, her modish head tilted back above the trim cravat of black crêpe and white tulle that her French maid had fabricated for her during the crossing, and a jewelled hand playing with Jane’s long pigtail. Her sister Patience sat opposite her at her table, her head in her hands, her bony fingers poked up among her meagre locks, and Jane took in that evening with a kind of anguish of loyalty the contrast between the two women. It seemed to her somehow very pitiful that her Aunt Patty should be so ugly when her mother was so beautiful. With a childish absence of any vestige of a sense of humour, she felt at one moment ashamed for her aunt and almost angry with her mother, and then ashamed for her mother and angry with her aunt.

“I wanted to tell you, Patty, that I think it would be a good thing now for this big gawk of a girl to go to a finishing school in New York. You’ll probably be giving up this house soon, and I don’t want her with me yet awhile.”

Jane in talking to me of this moment said that she felt as if her mother’s hand that was playing affectionately with her hair an instant before had suddenly picked up a hammer and hit her on the head. For an interval everything was blurred and dark in the room, with sparks that seemed to be shooting out of her brain. It was her Aunt Patty’s face that brought her back to her senses. It was a suffering, angry face, and presently she heard Patience say--“I am not going to give up this house, but I think you ought to take Jane to live with you. She wants to go, and she’s right. You are her mother.”

But Izzy paid no attention to her older sister.

“That’s nonsense! Paris is no place for a girl of her age. What in the world should I do with her? She’d be dreadfully in the way. Besides she must learn how to walk and manage her hands before I show her to people.”

The thing was done. Jane knew. She knew that her mother did not like her and never had liked her, and she knew somehow that her mother did not like her because she was ugly and reminded her of her father Silas Carpenter. She knew too that her Aunt Patty had always known this, and that her aunt loved her as her mother never would love her, and that the mottled flush on her grim face was due in part to anger and in part to the fear of losing her. She understood that her aunt had determined to help her to attain her heart’s desire, even at the price of losing herself the one thing more precious to her than anything in the world. She dared not look at her mother and she could not speak, and still she waited though incapable now of taking in the meaning of their voices. She heard vaguely her aunt saying something about making enough money by her lectures and publications to keep the house going, but paid no attention. A question addressed directly to herself by her mother at last roused her.

“Well, Jane, what do you say? Would you rather stay here alone with your Aunt Patty than go to boarding school with a lot of jolly girls of your own age?”

She did not hesitate then for an answer.

“Oh yes, if you can’t have me let me stay here,” and turning she cried, “Keep me, Aunt Patty, keep me,” and flung herself into those long trembling arms.

Mrs. Carpenter seems to have been mildly amused by this display of affection. With her face buried in the black woollen stuff of her aunt’s blouse, Jane heard her say--

“Well then, I leave it to you two. You can carry on as you like for the next two or three years. When you are eighteen, Jane, you will make your début in Paris society. You’ll want to bring Patty with you, I suppose, when the time comes.”

Mrs. Carpenter left three days later. The subject of Jane’s future was not broached again in her presence, but she heard the two women talking about professors of French and Italian and dancing classes, and the advantages of a saddle-horse and a pony cart. Her mother’s last words to her were--

“Now make the most of your time and don’t run about all over the country in the sun. Your complexion is the best thing about you.” And yet she didn’t hate her mother. Her idea of her mother had not even undergone for her any fundamental change. It was all the other way round. It was her opinion of herself that had suffered. With the dogged loyalty that seemed at times positively a sign of stupidity and was to influence every important decision of her life, she defended her mother to her own heart. If her mother did not like her it was because she was not likeable, because her father had been a dreadful man and had handed down to her some secret dangerous element of his own nature that made her antagonistic and unpleasant to brilliant happy people. Her Aunt Patty loved her because she was sorry for her. Her Aunt Patty was different from her mother. She, too, was ugly and a little queer; that was the bond between them. Poor Patience Forbes! Jane was to do her justice later, but for the moment she almost hated the sympathy between them, while her mother’s image like some magic adamant statue possessing a supernatural inviolability remained for her persistently and brilliantly the same. And when she was gone the question Jane put her aunt represented the result of hours of heart-broken weeping in which no whisper of a reproach had mingled.

“Aunt Patty,” she said, “how can I make my mother love me?” and her Aunt Patty had replied rather grimly--

“By trying to be what she wants you to be, I suppose.”

It was after this that Jane began sleeping at night with a strip of adhesive plaster across her mouth from her chin to her upper lip. Her aunt must have known but she did not interfere. I can imagine her standing over her niece’s bed when she came up from her protracted studies in the library, with a lamp in her hand, a tall grizzled figure in long ungainly black clothes, looking down at that sleeping face with the court-plaster pasted across the mouth, and I can see her weather-beaten face twist and tears well up in those shrewd intelligent eyes, and I seem to hear her utter--“Poor Jane, my poor lamb. If you could only take some interest in science. I don’t know what is to become of you.”

V

I begin to feel uncertain in telling this story. I am not at all sure that I have a just feeling for that American life of Jane’s. I have put down the facts as she told them to me and have described the people there as they came into being for me, from her talk, but how am I to know that they were really like that? Perhaps had I seen them with my own eyes I should have found them quite different: narrow, dull people with shrill twanging voices and queer American mannerisms. It may be that they would have bored me as they bored Mrs. Carpenter. St. Mary’s Plains I have seen for myself, but what did I see? A railway station, a few streets, a deep wide muddy river flowing by full of ships and barges. The town expressed nothing to me. It remained enigmatic. Of the hidden life going on in all those houses I knew nothing. I did not even understand what I saw. There were billboards all about the railway station advertising American products. Enormous nigger babies three times life-size stared from wooden fences. The Gold Dust Twins? Why gold dust, why twins, why nigger babies? How should I know? There were other garish things: I seem to remember flags and red, white and blue streamers festooning telegraph poles, in celebration I suppose of some national holiday. It was all too foreign. I could not translate it to myself. It made me feel very tired, and now this effort to recreate the atmosphere makes me weary. It is such a strain for the imagination. I know that my picture is incomplete and therefore false. I have touched on the gentleness and good breeding of Jane’s people, on the quiet of their God-fearing lives, but that word God-fearing: it is strange; it suggests something stern and uncompromising that is very different from anything we know in Paris. It suggests a great seriousness, a bare nakedness before the mystery of the unknown, a challenge of fate and an exaltation, of virtue. It affects me like a bleak wind. I turn away from it with relief. I look out of my window with a sigh. There is the good Abbé coming out of the convent gate. He has been hearing confessions; he has been taking away the sins from burdened hearts and tying them up into neat little bundles to be dropped into the Seine. God bless him, and thank God for our wise old priesthood and our wonderful beautiful old compromises, and thank God again for the jaunty swing of that black cassock. Ugh! I feel better. The little street is dim this morning. It has been raining. Dear, weary little old street--

There is no room here for American Puritanism. Paris is too old, too wise to harbour such things. Was it that that haunted Jane? Did she always see herself measured up to a fixed fine standard like a flagpole, the flagpole of American idealism, with a banner floating over her head, casting a shadow, purity, honesty, fear of God, written on it in shining letters? Payment, atonement, the wages of sin is death--old Mrs. Forbes reading out the words, believing but not worrying, but Jane making them terribly personal, questioning, puzzling, burying them in her mind. Heaven and hell; realities! Our actions leading us toward one or the other. Patience Forbes saying one had to suffer for a bad deed. The mystery about Jane’s father--something curious about his death. He was an unhappy man, his silence, she remembered it, she remembered him. She knew she was like him in some inexplicable way that frightened her. A world of stern simple values, all smoothed over for her by the gentleness and kindness of those people, the Forbes. Of course they were gentle and kind. They loved her. It was all right as long as she had them, but it was a curious preparation for life with Izzy in Paris.

Izzy sent for Philibert on her return from America. She must have talked to him about Jane. They must have had a curious conversation. I am certain that it was then that they elaborated their plan. The scheme was one of grand proportions. They became partners in a great enterprise. Mrs. Carpenter was to supply her daughter, who had enough money to realize even Philibert’s dreams, and he was to supply the required knowledge, as well as the _billet d’entrée_ into the social arena of Europe. These two suited each other perfectly. They knew what they wanted and each saw in the other the means of getting it. Broadly speaking they wanted the same thing, and if Philibert’s conception of their common destiny was utterly beyond her that was just what made her faith in him perfect. Audacious in her way, his audacity far outdid hers: whatever her idea his was always much grander; he made her feel beautifully humble by brushing away some of her most cherished hopes as unworthy of their attention.

“A palace in Venice?” I seem to hear him say, perched on one of her little straight gilt chairs, nursing his foot that was tucked under his knee. “But every one has palaces in Venice. Why not a Venetian palace in Paris, the Doge’s Palace itself, reproduced stone for stone, if that takes your fancy?”

And she would catch her breath with the beauty of the idea. Not that Philibert ever intended to do anything so silly as spoil a site in Paris by such a freak of humour. He was a _farceur_ if you like, but he had too much taste for that. He intended having his palace, and it was to be of such supreme beauty as to draw pilgrims from all over the world, but it was to be in harmony with its surroundings. The allusion to the House of the Doges was just his little happy joke. He was very cheerful in those days. People used to say--“Fifi does have luck. Look at him. Who is it now that adores him? Was ever a man so blatantly successful in his love affairs?” I must say he did have the look of being happily in love. His smooth cheeks were pink, his eyes, usually as expressionless as bits of blue enamel, were suffused with light, and the soft flaxen fuzz that grew round the bald spot on his head like the down on a little yellow gosling, seemed to send off electricity. Never in all his immaculate dandyism had he been so immaculate, his linen was superlative and the shine on his little pointed boots was visible halfway down the street. There was a giddy swing to his hurrying coat-tails, and he carried his shoulders superbly. Almost, but not quite, he achieved the look of being taller. And his contempt for the rest of us was of course greater than ever. Born with a gnawing consciousness of his own genius, he had for years been as exasperated as a Michael Angelo or a Paul Veronese forced by lack of space and a sufficiency of paints to spend his time doing little water-colour sketches: but he now saw himself on the way to realizing his inspirations in all their splendid amplitude, and of displaying before the eyes of men the finished gigantic masterpiece of his art. For Philibert was an artist: even Ludovic and Felix and Clémentine recognized that. He was an artist in life on a grand scale. He dealt with men and women and clothes and string orchestras and food and polished floors and marble staircases as a painter deals with the colours on his palette, or perhaps more exactly as the theatrical producer deals with stage properties. His stage was the world itself; he produced his plays and his pageants and his _tableaux vivants_ in the midst of the activities of society, and his actors, reversing the method of our modern stage where the players come down across the footlights to mingle with the audience, were selected by him from the general public without their knowing it, and found themselves playing a part in a scene he had created round them and for them as if by magic. Audacious? Ah, but who could be more so? Who but Fifi would have had the impertinence to take a real live king and make him, all unconscious, play the principal part in a pantomime before a handful of spectators? Mrs. Carpenter had dreamed of entertaining kings. Philibert entertained them, but he did something much more extraordinary; he put them into his play and made them entertain him.

Who in Paris will ever forget the night he threw open his door for the Czar of all the Russias? Who does not remember how he stage-managed the crowd outside, how troops of singers from the Opera mingled with the mob far down the street and sang hymns of acclamation as the royal guest approached his fairy palace, so illumined as to shine like a single rosy jewel? And the golden carpet thrown down on the marble stairs, and Jane standing alone at the top of that fantastic staircase, like an emerald column, her train arranged by Philibert’s own clever hands sweeping down the steps beneath her to add supernaturally to her height, her strange face under its diadem of jewels looking as small in the distance as the carved image cut out of a coin. Do people not talk even now of that night, and allude to Philibert as the last of the benevolent despots? “He was unique,” you can still hear them say it, “there will never be any one like him. No one can amuse the world as he did.” And no one ever will. The War has changed all that. François I. was his father; the Medici were his forerunners; he was the last of his kind.

But he refined on this sensational achievement. He went farther. Only a few realized quite how far he did go. In his most brilliant days, I was on the point of saying during the most brilliant period of his reign, he played plays at which he himself was the sole spectator. I remember the occasion when a certain popular Prince, heir at that time to one of the most solid thrones in Europe, expressed a desire to come and shoot at the Château de Ste. Clothilde. Mrs. Carpenter had been all of a tremble with pleasure. It was the first royal visitor to sleep under his roof. Philibert had restored our old place in the country, and had in five years managed by a miracle to have there the best partridge shooting in France. “You will have a large party for His Royal Highness, I suppose?” Mrs. Carpenter had ventured timidly. How humble and self-effacing she had grown by that time, poor thing. “Not at all,” replied Philibert. “There will be no women and not more than six guns.” And he added then with a sublime simplicity unequalled, I believe, by any monarch or any court jester in history, “When royalty comes to Ste. Clothilde for the shooting, there is another place laid at table, that is all.”

Poor Izzy, she was completely at a loss. No longer could she attempt to follow him. It was Jane who understood. She looked at him curiously through her gleaming half-closed eyes; I remember the look, while she breathed in a whisper--“Take care, you will have nothing left to live for.” I remember the tone of that remark.

But I am anticipating too much. I meant to speak here merely of his matrimonial expectations. These hopes gave his person an added lustre and his fine family nose an accentuated sneer. Nevertheless he kept them secret: no one knew that Mrs. Carpenter even had a daughter. She never mentioned her to any of us. On the other hand she never mentioned Philibert in her letters to Jane. It was part of the scheme. They had worked it out completely between them to its smallest details. Jane would be dangerously independent. She would be in no way answerable to her mother for all that immense lot of money. It was best then that she should suspect nothing. She would arrive, the Marquis de Joigny would be presented to her and would fall in love with her at first sight. Her mother would leave her free to choose for herself. Philibert made himself responsible for the rest.

And, in the meantime, while these two master minds were at work, Jane still waited in the Grey House for her mother to come and fetch her, waited as the appointed time drew near with little of the old exultant expectancy, but instead with nervous misgiving. She was afraid of not pleasing her mother, she was in an agony at the thought of leaving her Aunt Patience.

And I find myself now, as I sit here, painfully counting with suspended breath the last days of Jane’s girlhood in St. Mary’s Plains. I see them silently slipping by over her unconscious head as she sat in the back garden among her Aunt Patty’s hollyhocks, or walked with her French governess along the homely streets, swinging her school books by a strap, humming a tune under her breath, her neat modest clothes swinging to the rhythm of her beautiful young body, her strange little ugly ardent face lifted to the sweet air in frank animal enjoyment. Patience Forbes stands on the front stoop between the two wooden pillars waiting for her to come running up the path, waiting for the generous clasp of those strong young arms, waiting to feel once more the contact of all that pure vital youthfulness, and I hear as they sit down to supper opposite each other, with the tall candles lighted on the old mahogany table and the hot muffins steaming under the folded white napkin, the sound of the grandfather clock in the hall, ticking out the last precious fleeting moments of their time together.

This is very painful, I will not linger over it. I bring myself back, I falter, what then am I to think of? Where turn my attention? So much is ugly. Ah, but Jane, why go any further? Is it not enough? Is it not clear to you as it is to me? Is there any need to say more? Was it not all just as I say? Now that you are back there at last alone, now that we have lost you for ever, now that you have gone, irresistibly drawn out of your splendour to the little shabby place you loved, what is there to torment you? Philibert, Bianca? What have they to do with you now? They hated you. How can you be beholden to people who did you nothing but harm? But Jane, there were some of us who adored you, and if you had told us everything, as you at last told me, we would have loved you only the more.

* * * * * * * * *

I sometimes wonder whether Mrs. Carpenter ever suspected what a narrow shave she had towards the end, and how all her plans very nearly came to nothing at the moment of their fruition because of Bianca. It is probable that she had little more idea of the danger than a vague uneasy suspicion that Philibert for a time was distraught by some influence whose source she ignored. She had met Bianca but did not connect her with Philibert; knowing almost nothing in those days of what she would have called Philibert’s family life. There was no one to tell her that Philibert had once wanted to marry Bianca and that old François had refused him as a suitor for his daughter’s hand because of his lack of fortune. Izzy knew nothing about the strange intimacy of these two. How should she? Philibert was not likely to tell her and certainly none of the rest of us were in the habit of discussing with her the private affairs of our families. My mother knew of course; she doted on Bianca, and Claire, and all the family. They had all desired the match. Bianca was a pearl that they collectively coveted, and when things went wrong they had all been annoyed with the old rake her father. Aunt Clothilde had gone so far as to rap him over the knuckles with her fan one day when he took her out to dinner, and to say in her best rude manner--“You’ve done a pretty thing, spoiling the lives of those two children. And what’s Bianca got from her mother? Five hundred thousand francs a year. Just so, and you will leave her the same when you die, which will be before long at the pace you are going. And Philibert has nothing but his debts, but then, who knows, I might have given him something. I’m not so in love with him as some, but still he’s my nephew, and the two of them were made for each other. Now you’ll see, they’ll both turn out badly.” But François only laughed as if he were enjoying a wicked joke that he was not going to share with her. He was always like that, chuckling to himself in a sly sort of way that made you creep and roused the curiosity of women. Sometimes he would stare at me with his pale, red-rimmed, half-closed eyes and that smile on his face as if my deformity was very amusing. I hated him. I could have told them what kind of a father he was to Bianca.

In any case she was married a year later to her well-to-do nonentity, and we all went to the wedding, and Aunt Clo, being a near relative, walked in the _cortège_ with François and made faces behind her prayer book. But Philibert was white as a sheet and kicked a wretched dog out of the way as he came down the church steps with such violence that he broke its paw. Bianca was, I remember, as lovely and serene as a lily. She didn’t speak to Philibert at all the day she was married. She just kept him standing there near her, not too near, during the reception, as if he belonged to her, as if he were a flunkey of some sort, and never once so much as looked at him. But she spoke to me. She asked me why I had not proposed for her hand. “I might have accepted you, you know” she said in that small reedy penetratingly sweet voice of hers--“just to spite them all,”--and there wasn’t a trace of a smile on her clear curving lips. Devil--she meant it for Philibert, of course, and of course he heard.

My mother used to say that Bianca reminded her of a very young Sir Galahad. Claire suggested half-mockingly St. Sebastian. I thought she was like a fox, quick and cruel with a poisonous bite. As a matter of fact, in those days she looked a harmless little thing. Her small snow-white square face was sweetly modelled and framed as it was by a cap of short black hair that was cut _à la Jeanne d’Arc_, it had the look of a mediaeval Italian angel. Only her enormous eyes very blue and deep and her voice gave her away. If one watched closely one caught glimpses in those eyes of the invisible monster locked up in that light smooth body; if one listened to her voice one heard it. She seemed to know this, and much of the time she kept her eyes lowered. Cool and aloof and monosyllabic she hid herself, her real self, calculating her power and economical of it, deceptive, waiting till it should be worth her while to disengage the magic that lurked in the smooth complexity of her little person. Her voice was not a pure single note, but a double reedy sound that had a penetrating harmony. One remembered it with a haunting exasperation. It was rather high in pitch, and the words it carried did not punctuate the sound of it, but seemed to be strung like beads on a sustained vibrating chord as if on some double coppery wire. Each word was distinct and beautifully enunciated by her lips without interfering with the sound that flowed through them. There was nothing guttural or emotional about Bianca’s voice, but it was disturbing; it irritated and seemed to correspond to some secret nerve-centre of pleasure in the listener’s brain.

I have watched her sometimes using her voice for special purposes of her own, but for the most part in company she tried to subdue it, and would often stop herself in the middle of one of her rapid speeches with a little annoyed laugh. She would then look down and move away, but even her floating stiffly off like a rigid little broomstick with a pair of wings or wheels on the end of it had a strange charm.

Her gestures were very restrained. She had a way of holding attention so closely when apparently doing nothing, that when she did make the slightest movement it conveyed exactly what she intended it to convey.

Philibert was a connoisseur fit to appreciate her, and she knew it. They had in their precocious youth recognized each in the other a rare complementary quality, but even in the days when Bianca with abbreviated skirts had let me make love to her, the affinity between Philibert and herself had made her hate him. It was a curious attraction I thought that made them constantly want to hurt each other. I knew well enough that Bianca was only sweet to me in order to make Philibert angry. Sometimes in the garden of our house, where we played while François paid his respects of my mother, she would kiss me, looking sideways at Philibert all the time, and he would pirouette on one toe and pretend not to care, and would yell with laughter at me and call out--“Don’t think she loves you. You’re crooked. You will never be any better. You can’t do this. Look at me. She loves me.” And Bianca would turn away from us and look at him as he told her to, and say to him--“I don’t like you at all,” and then stalk away into the drawing room where she would wheedle from her father a succession of lumps of sugar soaked in cognac, and if we followed we would find her rubbing her smooth little cheek up and down against François’ whiskers and making little gurgling noises of pleasure. François was certainly a queer kind of father. Philibert and I could have told tales about that.--If it had only been lumps of sugar dipped in brandy--. We took note with a kind of shocked envy. Once she took us down to the pantry and showed us a bottle of “Triple Sec.” “That’s the nicest,” she said, “it’s like honey fire.”

When she was ten he turned her loose in his library, or at any rate finding her there with some dreadful book in her lap, only laughed. Every one knows what that library contained. Rare editions, old bindings, a priceless collection; bibliophiles came from far to finger those volumes. François was a discriminating collector. But for Bianca--no one discriminated for her. One can see her like a little greedy white lamb browsing in the poisonous herbage of that field of knowledge. She began with the memoirs of Casanova. She had picked it out because it was by an Italian. She was always dreaming about Italy, her mother’s country. Her mother had died while she was a baby, but Bianca seemed to remember her. She often spoke about her, and every Friday went with her governess to light a candle in St. Sulpice for the repose of her spirit. As for her literary discoveries, Philibert alone was aware of what she was up to, and even he didn’t know much about it. Occasionally she would drop a hint, or lend a book. She would never have admitted even to him that she read all the books she did read. She understood Philibert perfectly. As she grew older she allowed him to suspect that she was wise, but not too wise. She was willing to be for him an object of mystification, but never of vulgar curiosity. Gradually she grew conscious of a purpose in regard to Philibert, and I believe that this purpose had something to do with her refusing to marry him. For, after all, she could have brought her father round had she tried to. No, it was not her idea to marry the man she liked. Her idea was far more amusing than that.

What happened just before Jane’s arrival in Paris was simple enough. Bianca had been married two years. She had been to Italy and had come back to find Philibert thick as thieves with a great grey-headed American, and she had asked herself what this meant. It didn’t take her long to find out. She had a way of knowing what he was up to. Probably he told her outright, and she was not pleased. For the moment she did not like the idea of Philibert’s marrying any one, least of all a colossal American fortune. She was far too clever to make a scene. She had other means of getting her own way, and now out of caprice she exerted them. I imagine her opening her monstrous eyes just a little wider than usual and allowing Philibert to look into them. I can see her move ever so slightly with a small jerk of the hips and upward undulation of her slim body, and I watch her lean forward to allow the faint suggestion of that magic essence of hers to disengage itself from her person, through her lifted eyelids, through her sweet parted lips, through the tips of her long delicate fingers, and I see Philibert falter in his talk about the American girl, and silently watch her, and get to his feet like a man in a dream and come close but not too close. For a fortnight she kept him like that, in a trance; everywhere he followed her.

Mrs. Carpenter lost him. It was during the month of May. Bianca went about a good deal that Spring and was very much admired. It was at a big afternoon affair that I saw her, standing with Philibert looking out at the crowded gardens. She was very young still; she was nothing more than a very thin slip of a thing with pretty little sticks of legs and a pair of long delicate arms hanging close to her sides, the fingers pressed against the folds of her slinky muslin frock. She stood very still and rather stiff, her heels together and her lovely head just tilted very slightly away from Philibert as if she had drawn it back quickly and gently at the sound of a disturbing murmur, or as if perhaps she were enticing that murmur, as yet unuttered, from his lips. I watched them. They did not look at each other. Their eyes traced parallel lines of vision before them over the heads of the crowd. Nothing betrayed their deep communion save this common stillness. I did not hear them speak or see their lips move, but I know that Philibert was speaking; I learnt afterwards what it was he was saying.

He was asking her to bolt with him.

It was the moment of supreme danger for Izzy Carpenter. The marvellous edifice she had so carefully fashioned with Philibert hung suspended by a thread. Like some great gorgeous glittering chandelier with a thousand candles hoisted into the air by Bianca’s little finger, it hung there swaying in space, held up to the ceiling of heaven by the thread of her hesitation. Philibert, his hands behind him holding his top hat and gloves against the neat back of his morning coat, watched it. Through closed teeth he had spoken without looking at his companion and now he waited in silence. If she assented the whole thing would be dashed to the ground in a million pieces. He took in all that it meant for him. Like one of those drunkards whose faculties are most keen when they are under the influence of liquor, he saw with excruciating clearness, through the superlative excitation of Bianca’s fascination that was working upon him, the beauty and magnitude of the thing he was sacrificing. And yet if she had said it, the word he awaited, he would have turned away from all that débris with a sneer, so perfectly had Bianca made him feel that she was worth it, worth anything, worth more than even he, with his formidable imagination could conceive of.

She didn’t say it. She didn’t say anything. She merely lowered her head after an instant’s utter stillness and floated away from him. I wonder if there was the slightest of smiles on her lovely averted lips. Perhaps not. Her smile was deep down in the well of her abysmal being. She had had an inspiration. She had thought of something much more amusing than what he proposed. She would reveal it to him later; there was plenty of time. Or perhaps she would never reveal it to him at all, but just make him do as she wished without letting him know that she had thought of it long before. In any case she would leave him alone now.

And so Mrs. Carpenter was saved and went to America to fetch Jane.

VI

Philibert had given himself a month in which to win Jane’s hand, and it took him five. I don’t know why I find any comfort in this fact, but I do. I am glad she kept him waiting. I am glad the two conspirators were uncomfortable, even for so short a time, and there is no doubt that they were uncomfortable. Jane paid no attention to her mother’s funny little friend, who wore corsets and high heels and used scent. She sized him up in a long grave glance that covered him from tip to toe and then seemed to forget about him. The truth was that she was absorbed in her mother. To her great delight she had found in that quarter an unexpected cordiality. It almost seemed as if her mother had decided to like her. She had never been half so nice.

And she fell in love with Paris.

Wonderful enchantress city, queen woman of cities! It had assumed to greet her its most charming and gentle aspect. She arrived one evening in June. She held her breath as she drove across the Place de la Concorde, where the light was silver and blue, and up the Champs Elysées towards the Arc de Triomphe that stood out against the sunset glow like a great and lovely gate into Heaven. She thought, so she told me afterwards, of the magic city under the sea in the poem by Edgar Allen Poe. The following morning she was up with the milkman and had slipped out of the house alone before any one was awake, and had walked from the Avenue du Bois down to the Tuileries Gardens and back again as the newsvenders were taking down the shutters of their kiosks. They smiled at her and nodded. A little morning breeze laughed in the trees. A woman came by wheeling a cart full of flowers. She filled her arms and arrived at her mother’s doorway breathless with pleasure. Mrs. Carpenter had the sense not to scold her, but she was obliged during the days that followed to engage a special duenna who could walk far enough and fast enough to keep up with her daughter. It appeared that Jane had read a good deal of French history. She visited churches, monuments and museums and made excursions to Versailles, la Malmaison, Fontainebleau. The Rue de la Paix amused her, she liked the clothes her mother bought her; but after a long morning at the dressmaker’s, standing to let little kneeling women drape silks on her young body, she would gulp down her lunch and start out again to explore, on foot, refusing to take the motor.

One day she turned into this little street. I saw her. I thought at first that she was a Russian, some young Cossack princess perhaps. Her dog, a Great Dane, walked beside her, his head close to her splendidly moving limbs. I had never seen any one walk like that. She came on, her head up, her arms down along her sides, and the wind, or was it the force of her own swift movement, made her garments flow back from her. It was the _Victoire de Samothrace_ walking through the sunlit streets of Paris. I watched her approach with a strange excitement. Behind her trotted her valiant duenna, a hurrying little woman in black. And as the radiant white figure came nearer I saw that she was very young, scarcely more than a great glorious child, and her strange ugly face under her close white hat shaped like a helmet seemed to me, all glowing though it was with health, to be half asleep. When she was gone I turned back to my rooms and sat with my head in my hands thinking of how curious it was, the regal carriage of that fine free controlled body, and that face that did not know itself. I felt oppressed and exhilarated and somehow full of pity. It was dangerous to be like that, so young, so brave, so unknowing. Yes, an ugly face, but her walk was the most beautiful I had ever seen.

Through July Philibert made no progress with his suit. It was a puzzling problem for him and for Izzy. Mrs. Carpenter found herself the all too successful rival of the man she had selected for her daughter. Jane’s attitude was simple enough. She enjoyed everything immensely and felt that this was just what she had hoped to find. Her wonderful mother who had appeared at one time not to care for her was now giving her daily proofs of affection. And so she was happy. Mrs. Carpenter must have been nonplussed. The connection was obvious, for the more contented Jane was the less sign did she make of wanting anything else. She was delighted at being with her mother: how could it occur to her to want to get married?

And Philibert’s artfulness with women was of no use to him here. His professional tricks were wasted. He could only hold her attention by telling her about the things she looked at; histories, anecdotes, dissertations on art and architecture she would listen to with profound interest. She kept him for hours in the galleries of the Louvre discoursing on the great masters, and occasionally she would say with a sigh while he mopped his exhausted head--“How much you know.” It was the only tribute he got from her.

For August they went to Trouville. Monsieur Cornuché had not yet invented Deauville. The trip was very nearly Philibert’s undoing. He was very hard put to it, was our Philibert, during that month of August. And how he must have hated it. Nothing but sheer grit kept him going, nothing less than the most enormous prize would have induced him to put up with so much misery.

She rode, she swam, she played tennis, she hired a yacht and sailed it. He was most of the time quite literally out of breath with running after tennis balls, carrying golf clubs, galloping down the sands after her vanishing figure; and to add to his discomfiture some of his friends, those whom he could not be seen with under the circumstances, saw him all too often and laughed behind the screen of the little red and white bathing tents. I enjoy in retrospect his discomfiture. Such as it was it constituted for Jane an unconscious revenge. For a month she kept her mother and Philibert on pins and needles, and I believe that if her mother had not been constantly at hand to dress him up again and again in all the trappings of romance, that Jane would have found him finally and irretrievably ridiculous, just a poor exasperated absurd little man who was no good at games and got blue with cold in the water. For of course what saved Philibert in the end was Jane’s desire to please her mother.

Mrs. Carpenter was obliged to take a definite line. It had not been her intention to do so, but she found that she must if the plan were to come off at all. I don’t truly believe the woman was more double-faced than most. She would if one hauled her out of the grave to make her defence, put up, I suppose, a respectable argument. She would say that she had done what thousands of mothers do every day, and what all of them should do. She had picked out a husband whom she considered a brilliant match for her daughter and had married her to him. The only reason that obliged her to resort to subterfuge, and hers, she would say, was of the vaguest and slightest, was the girl’s complete financial independence. Her own extraordinary husband had given her no hold over her daughter, but had put everything into the hands of a trio of bumptious bigoted American citizens. What she really was doing when she had made her plans for Jane and then got her to fulfil them without knowing it, was not bamboozling the child, but getting the best of those horrid trustees. If it had not been for them and the grotesque will they kept waving in her face, she would have said to Jane simply, “Here, my darling, is the man I have chosen for you. You will be married in a month’s time.” But she couldn’t do that. She was forced to make her daughter take him of her own free choice, and so she would go on, briskly explaining that she had done it all for the best. Was it not a creditable desire on her part to see her child the leader of French society? And had not Jane subsequently become even more than that? Was there a town in America that did not read with envy the newspaper accounts of her triumphs? Did it not all come out quite as she had foreseen? If the two were not happy what did that prove? Just nothing at all beyond the tiresome truism that marriages always ended in making people hate each other.

Mrs. Carpenter had adopted a jocular easy manner with her daughter on bringing the girl to Europe that seemed to express her happy sense of their being comrades and equals. The rôle she assumed was that of an elder sister who was ready to give any amount of good-natured advice when asked for, but would in no way interfere with the freedom of the fortunate youngster. This was Izzy’s way of being careful and of making it impossible for Jane ever to turn round and say--“It was my mother who urged me to do it.” Fortunately for her peace of mind Jane hid nothing from her and was constantly asking for guidance.

It was Mrs. Carpenter’s habit to have her morning coffee in bed at nine o’clock after an hour’s massage, and to let Jane come and talk to her while she sipped it and ran through her letters. The girl would come in from an early ride, plunge into a cold bath, and all aglow and smelling of soap and youth would run to her mother’s wonderful scented bedroom where, draped in her dressing-gown, she would stretch herself out on a chaise-longue; and Izzy, under her lace coverlet, enjoying the sensation of her willowy figure rubbed down once more to smooth well-being, would encourage Jane to talk. It was her hour for getting together the data that she would hand on later in the day to Philibert.

Jane would say--“Our little Marquis was riding this morning. He joined me. His eyes looked puffy. They had funny little pouches under them.” And Mrs. Carpenter, who, with a languid finger turning the page of a letter, had pricked up her ears, would sigh inwardly and say aloud--

“The poor man must be tired. He has so many demands on him.” And then secretly irritated but maintaining a bland countenance, she would listen to the girl telling how she had given her would-be suitor a lesson in riding.

“You know, Mummy, he was really hurting that horse’s mouth dreadfully, and he didn’t seem to be sorry when I showed him. Do you think he is just a tiny bit cruel?”

And again Izzy would reply mildly, in defense of the absent one--“My darling, I know him to be the kindest man in the world.”

But Jane did not always by any means show interest in the Marquis de Joigny, and much as it annoyed Mrs. Carpenter to hear him criticized, it disturbed her even more when he was not mentioned at all for days together. Jane would bring with her a letter from her Aunt Patty and read aloud long extracts about St. Mary’s Plains and its tiresome doings, about Patience’s rheumatism and Patience’s bird lectures, and Uncle Bradford’s last new case, and the Mohican bank’s new building on Pawamak Street, and Aunt Beth’s housekeeping adventures in Seattle, until poor Izzy was bored to tears; or she would be full of the problems of Fan’s life with her Polish husband. She saw Fan much more often than her mother could have wished. One day she said--“I don’t think Fan is happy. I suppose it’s because she has married a Roman Catholic. It doesn’t seem to work very well, changing your religion.” And Izzy in alarm scribbled a note of warning and sent it to Philibert by a special messenger. She usually wrote to him on the days she couldn’t manage to see him. Somehow or other he must be kept every day, _au courant_. I can imagine these messages.

“The child’s head is full of Fan and her wretched Pole, and the effect of religion on marriage. Don’t for anything touch on the subject in talk. You had better keep away from churches when you take her out. She is disturbed by Fan’s money troubles and Ivanoff’s gambling. Don’t for heaven’s sake go near the Casino while we are here.”

It would be comic if it were not something else. I see my elder brother perusing these missives with fervour and tossing them away with exasperated petulance.

Go near the Casino? Had he done so? Was he not the perfect nursemaid?

It was Fan who told me about all this afterwards. She had been in Paris three years before Jane, had got herself brought over by some chance acquaintances who had paid her passage across the Atlantic, and had allowed her to benefit by their loose indifferent chaperonage once she got here. It was all she needed. In six months she had married Ivanoff and knew everybody in Paris who from her point of view was worth knowing. Mrs. Carpenter had been civil to her, but not friendly. Nevertheless it was in Izzy’s drawing room that she had met Ivanoff.

Ivanoff was one of Izzy’s satellites. She was one of the people he lived on. He could expect to win twenty thousand francs from her at Bridge during a winter. Besides that she gave him many meals and introduced him to other people who could be fleeced for more substantial sums. We all knew Ivanoff. His title was supposed not to bear too much looking into, and his estates in Poland were not, I believe, to be found on the map of that country, but he was very presentable and was renowned for his success with women. Fan fell in love with him promptly. He was big, he was dark, his brown face with its mongolian cast of feature, slanting eyes and thick sleek black hair seemed to her beautiful, and she believed that he had a deep romantic soul. Moreover he was a prince and he was like wax in her hands. She could not and did not resist him. Her stepfather made her an allowance of twenty-five thousand francs a year and showed no interest in what she did with it. There was no one to enquire into Ivanoff’s affairs or habits on Fan’s behalf. She was alone in the world and must make her own way. Life with Ivanoff would be a continual stream of parties; Monte Carlo, Paris, Biarritz, Deauville. The prospect glittered before her. Where could she have a good time if not in these gay haunts of pleasure? The thought of going back to St. Mary’s Plains made her feel sick.

She had been married a year or so when Jane joined her mother. Ivanoff was her slave. She could do anything with him except keep him from the gaming table. Her one worry was money, but she did not allow this to worry her much. Jane exasperated her that first summer. Fan felt herself much the wiser and years the older. Jane’s lamblike devotion to her mother “gave her fits.” And Jane seemed utterly indifferent to the enormous power of her money, she was too stupid, the way she let her mother and Philibert manage her. But Fan thought Philibert a great catch. She knew her Paris well enough to know that if Jane became Philibert’s wife her position would be immense. So she didn’t interfere, merely watched and laughed and thought Jane a fool not to see what Philibert was after.

October saw them all in Paris and Philibert not appreciably nearer his goal. Jane no longer ignored him, she now took him for granted, which was almost worse. He determined to be personal. It was not easy with Jane, but he must risk being thought impudent. One day he asked her what kind of a man she wanted to marry. She hesitated, thinking a moment. “A hero or a friend,” she answered. But when he said that he hoped he was her friend she smiled, refusing to take him seriously. The word hero however, gave him his cue. He had too much sense to try and pose as one himself, but the thought occurred to him that perhaps by telling her of other heroes who had belonged to his family and his country, some of the glamour of the past would touch him with a reflected brilliance for those candid romantic eyes. And the task was not uncongenial to him. He had a gift for story-telling and could gossip endlessly about historic personages. Where history was meagre he could rely upon his imagination. He began with the lovely story of Bayard and Du Guesclin and she listened with glowing eyes as he talked of those chivalrous knights. He had found the key. It was easy now to hold her attention. There followed hours and days filled with legend and anecdote, tales of brave chivalry and quaint custom. _Philippe le Beau_ and _Jeanne la Folle_, _Saint Louis_, _Henri IV_, _Clothilde de Joigny_, the saintly lady whose name was still honoured in the family, _Monseigneur de B----_ who had had his tongue cut out during the _Massacres de Septembre_; it was a rich field, and one where he knew his way about, and to supplement his talk he gave her little books of folklore and poetry, and songs of the Troubadours, the poems of Ronsard, and found for her an old parchment copy in script of that charming anonymous ballad that begins “Gentils Galants de France.”

And Jane, delighted, treated him with a new attentive kindness. He had gained her confidence and had touched her imagination, but there again his success seemed to end. He could get no further. It did not occur to her to ask why he took such pains to supply her eager mind with lovely legends. And so he fretted and fumed once more. I can imagine him wracking his brains for a solution. The problem would have presented itself to him with simple brutality. How rouse the girl’s emotions without frightening her? He hit on a plan. Mrs. Carpenter took a box at the Opera. There under cover of the music Philibert whispered adroitly to romantic youth, told her on every note of the scale that she was young and wonderful, that life was full of magic mystery, that the throbbing of her heart was its response to the summons of love, and that some day a man would come to her and beg her to allow him to carry her up and out on the surging torrent of that inspiration into a heaven of pure delight.

It worked. Under the hypnotic influence of the orchestra with its disturbing rhythm and moving harmonies, ravished by the seeming beauty of those sentimental voices, soaring, floating, dropping deep to caress and moan and shiver, all unconscious of the mediocrity, the coarseness, the bold sensuality, her little being stirred, and her senses, waking slowly in their chaste prison responded to the appeal of the man behind her in the shadow, who took on a little the romantic look of the hero on the stage. She did not know what was happening to her. She would come out of the theatre in a daze and walk silently between her mother and Philibert to the carriage and sink back into her corner, her head throbbing, and through half-closed eyelids would gaze with confusion and fear and vague painful pleasure at the tall hat and white shirt-bosom of the man facing her in the intimate gloom, and as though the smoothly moving carriage were just another box for the continuation of the performance she would hear the same voice speaking to her that had mingled with all that music, and she would find it impossible to distinguish between her companion’s reality and the magic charm of the glorious fiction.

One night when he left them at their door after an evening of this kind, she heard him say to her mother who had lingered behind--“_C’était très réussi ce soir_,” and give a little dry laugh. She did not ask herself what he meant, but his tone struck her ear as discordant and she remembered it afterwards. It was one of the things that flashed up out of her memory when Philibert, some years later, wanting once and for all to answer her questions as to why he had married her, told her with his incomparable lucidity all about the way he and her mother had used her. He put it to her completely then, explaining to her the details of their method and summing it all up with the words--“At least half the credit was your Mamma’s. Though she did not seem to be doing much she was working all the same like a galley-slave. Of course it was not her duty to make love to you, but it was she who prepared your mind for the seed I sowed in it, and it was she who kept me informed of your mental progress. I say mental; you know what I mean. Call it anything you like, but give full credit to your charming mother for what she did for you. She showed signs of positive genius.”

Thus it was that they put their heads together, and after the successful experiment of the Opera evenings had run its course for a month, Jane’s manner began to change. She no longer came rollicking into the room of a morning like a great roystering puppy. She no longer talked so much or so freely, and sometimes, heavy-eyed and pale, as if she had not slept well, she would lie silently on her back staring at the ceiling, and blush crimson when asked what her thoughts were. These facts were reported faithfully to Philibert of course, also the incidents of the morning, when Jane got up with a bound and placed herself abruptly before her mother’s long mirror and cried with the accent of despair--“Am I always to be so ugly?”

But I imagine Mrs. Carpenter in telling Philibert did not finish the story. She had said to Jane--“No, my child, you can be considered a beauty if you want to. With that body your face doesn’t matter. Men will admire you, never fear; in fact I know one that does already.”

Jane at that had turned away from the glass and had come to the foot of her mother’s bed and had said earnestly, with a flood of crimson mantling her face and throat--“But it’s not a man’s admiration I’m thinking of, mother dear, it’s yours.” The child had then become speechless and had gulped strangely with the effort not to break down and had given it up and gone quickly out of the room.

If Mrs. Carpenter was touched she did not say so, and she never referred to the incident in her subsequent talks with Jane, limiting her remarks on the girl’s appearance to a voluble flow of worldly advice.

“Never go in for curls or ribbons or fluffiness. That’s not your style. If you must look like a Chinese mummy then look it even more than you do. Make the most of your queerness. People won’t know whether you are ugly or handsome, but they’ll be bound to look at you. That’s all that’s necessary. Anything is better than being unnoticed. That you never will be. Nonsense, you must get used to being stared at. Most girls like it. Wear your hair straight back and close to your head. Never mind your lower lip. Don’t make faces trying to draw it in. Stick it out rather. Carry your head high. Look as if you were proud of your profile. Your dresses should always be straight and stiff like an oblong box. That one you’ve got on is too soft, and there’s too much trimming. You will be able to wear any amount of jewellery later, but never let yourself be tempted by lace. You walk well, and your back, thank God, is as flat as a board. You’ll never need to wear corsets if you’re careful, but you must learn what to do with your hands. You’re always clenching your fists as if you were going to hit somebody. And I don’t like those boys’ pumps you wear; they’re too round at the toe.” And so on and so on. And Jane, rather bewildered, would try to make out from all this whether her mother herself liked the person she was giving advice to or not.

But in the end, in spite of all her cautiousness, Izzy was obliged to commit herself. Jane didn’t let her off. On the contrary she went straight to her one evening with the proposal Philibert had made her. It was late and Mrs. Carpenter was sitting in front of her fire, wondering whether she had been right in leaving the two alone together for so long in the drawing room. She had never left them alone before. It had been Philibert’s suggestion and she had agreed with some slight misgiving. It had occurred to her of a sudden that perhaps he would not have dared to make such a proposal to one of his own people, and she felt a flush of annoyance. Strange inconsistency on the part of a woman who had so thrown to the winds the spiritual decencies, but there you are; she was worried and mortified, and when Jane entered, turned to her with a warmer gesture than was her habit. The girl responded by kneeling at her side and winding her arms round the slim waist and saying--

“Do you really want me to do it, Mother dear?”

The question put in that way, suggesting as it did a keener insight on Jane’s part into her mother’s heart than had even been imagined by the latter, must have been startling. Mrs. Carpenter hesitated, hedged, was at a loss.

“What do you mean, child?”

But Jane was not to be put off.

“You know what I mean, Mummy darling. The question is, do you really want it? I told him that I would do what you said, and I mean it.” And then rather quaintly she added--“I don’t suppose Aunt Patty would approve of me. She likes independence. But I have made up my mind to do as you wish.”

There it was. Mrs. Carpenter was forced into it. Jane, all unknowingly, had her. It was no use asking the girl if she liked him: she only said she felt she undoubtedly would if she made up her mind to, and so at last after some more hesitating Izzy was obliged to say--

“Well, darling, since you will have it so, I must tell you that your acceptance of this distinguished man would make me very happy.” And Jane, still uncommunicative and by some marvellous instinct of profound youth hiding at last the tumultuous feelings of her heart, accepted her mother’s decision sweetly and calmly and went away to her room.

If she saw there in her mirror, as we are told girls do on such occasions, a new strange creature, the difference was in her case less fictitious than most. A very rapid transformation does seem to have come over her after this. It was as if in accepting Philibert she had walked bravely up to him and had given him the secret key to her soul, and as if in turn he had thrown a handful of dust in her eyes. The effect of the interchange was instantaneous. Philibert had seemed to her in the beginning, an old man, excessively foreign and occasionally ridiculous; he was now a hero. I cannot explain the change. I only know that it was so. The mystery of her girlhood remains to me a mystery. Who am I to understand her love for my detestable brother? Who am I to understand the love of any innocent girl for any man? I only know that Jane’s passion was derived from her own romantic nature and not from him. I have a feeling that had she once made up her mind to love an iron poker, she would have loved it with the same fire and the same ecstasy. At that period of her life the object of her affection was scarcely more real than a symbol. Philibert represented for her not himself but her dreams. It may be so with most young people. I do not know. But what Jane meant when she said to her mother that she was sure she would come to like him if she made up her mind to, was really that she knew she would adore him if with her mother’s approval, she let herself go, i. e., let her imagination control her feelings. What she wanted from her mother was not only an indication but a guarantee. Her mother’s consent to her marriage she took as a sign that she could gloriously give her heart its freedom.

And Jane’s heart now that he had won it was a surprise to Philibert. He had gone a-hunting for a dove or some timid sparrow, and he found himself with an eagle on his hands. He was expected to soar with this young companion that he had captured. There was no hesitation about Jane. Spreading wide the wings of her beautiful belief, she flew, she was making for heaven.

Poor, wonderful, ignorant Jane. It was to her of a simplicity. Since she knew now, because her mother had said so, that he was worth marrying, then he was worthy of all her confidence. Shyly but bravely she told him so. She spoke to him of God, of life with him after death, of sharing with him all her thoughts. She unbared to him her ideals, confessed her dreams, faltered out her fear of her own wild impulses, recounting to him simply the affair of the boy in St. Mary’s Plains she had almost killed. She told him all about the Grey House and her Aunt Patty and her grandmother’s death and her Aunt Minnie’s religious fanaticism. It is dreadful to think of. He has said that he was never so bored in his life. I have heard him say so, and of course he would have been. After a rubber or two at the Jockey, he would turn up at Izzy’s flat for tea and find Jane waiting for him, her face charged with grave confident sweetness. She would put a hand on each of his shoulders and kiss his lips, and then drawing him to a sofa beside her would hold his hand in both of hers and pour out to him the secrets of her heart, and he, beside himself with boredom, would listen and make his responses to the clear chant of her young voice singing its joy.

“We will be everything to each other, Philibert.”

“Yes, dear.”

“We will share each other’s thoughts.”

“Of course.”

“You will teach me how to love you.”

“I will.”

“And be worthy of you.”

“My darling.”

“Love is very wonderful, Philibert.”

“Yes, dear.”

“I feel one should be very much alone to understand. You and I alone. We must keep ourselves free to be alone together.”

“Yes.”

“Sometimes I am sorry that we have so much money.”

“Why, my darling?”

“It will create obligations. We shall be expected to see so many people and do so many things. But I am glad to have it if you like it. I am proud to bring you something. I would give you everything in the world if I could. I am yours, and what I have is yours, to do with as you like. But you must never feel indebted to me, for there is no indebtedness. I can’t quite explain what I mean, but it humiliates me even to think of giving between you and me. The money is ours, that is all, and therefore yours. You will control it and give me an allowance for dresses. I say this now because I don’t want to speak of it again. You understand, don’t you, Philibert? Let’s not talk of it any more, ever.”

Such was her attitude, such was her idea, and all he had to do was to let himself be loved.

But I don’t like to think about Philibert in his relation to Jane. I wish I could leave him out of the story altogether.

In the meantime Mrs. Carpenter, while highly gratified that her plans had worked out so well, was nevertheless a little taken aback at the extravagant turn they were taking. She may well have been more then a little worried at Jane’s going ahead at such a pace. There was no comfort for Izzy now in conferring with Philibert. The shape of the triangle had changed. The coveted man had drawn away from her and was as close now to her daughter as he had once been to her. She found herself no longer the strong base that held them together. They could exist now without her. And Philibert began very delicately to make her feel this. His manner conveyed--“You have done your part, and very well on the whole, but still you know it’s finished. You’re really no use to me now. I shan’t of course go back on my bargain. You shall have your share of the fun. Only don’t bother me by continually making mysterious signs. You will only succeed in awakening her suspicions and wearing out my patience.”

Poor Jane, it would have taken more than her mother’s irritable gaiety to rouse her suspicions. If any one in those days had come to her with a full recital of the truth, she would not have believed a word of it. And when her Uncle Bradford did come in his capacity of trustee to have a look at the fiancé, she flew into a rage with the good man at the first sign of his disapproval. I did not see Bradford Forbes. I never saw him. Jane tells me that he was a large heavy man with a strong American accent, a rosy face and a pince-nez. I should like to have seen him. I should like to have seen the image of Philibert reflected in those eyeglasses. The sight would have been edifying.

Mr. Forbes had said to Jane--“Well, I don’t think much of your little Dude. I’d rather you had taken some one more your own size. I guess he can’t come much higher than your shoulder.” And Jane had flown at him like a wild cat and had told him that he had no business to make fun of her lover, who was the most important man in Paris and a million times cleverer than anybody from their home town. If her Uncle Bradford had had any hope of dissuading her from the step she was about to take he seems to have abandoned it then and there. He could find out nothing positively wrong with the head of the house of Joigny. The little Marquis proved satisfactorily that though his income was pitiful he had no debts. And when Mr. Forbes pointed out to him that there could be nothing in the way of a marriage settlement, Silas Carpenter’s will making such an alienation of property impossible, Philibert had taken his breath away by the graceful ease with which he accepted the situation. How was the kind shrewd American citizen to know that Philibert already had the will by heart, and long ago had accepted the inconvenience and risk of hanging on to his wife’s property by hanging on to her? He made a better impression in their hour’s talk than Jane’s uncle wanted to admit to himself. The good man was obliged to fade away as he had come, and float off like some wistful porpoise across the Atlantic leaving behind him only light ephemeral bubbles of amused disapproval. All the same he had done enough to make Jane very angry and obstinate and produce from her hand a long letter to her Aunt Patty in which she inveighed against the obtuse narrow-mindedness of the entire American nation. Patience Forbes seems not to have answered this letter. She had sent Jane a note by her uncle of terse affection and grim good wishes, but her correspondence with her niece during the months preceding and following the marriage almost entirely ceased. I imagine that after listening to her brother’s account of the man in Paris who was to claim her Jane, she was filled with foreboding, and being powerless chose to remain silent. And Jane was too happy to wonder why her aunt did not write to her. She did not often think of the Grey House during those days.

VII

My family, as I think I have already mentioned, had a way of doing disagreeable things gracefully. They could even when necessary carry off affairs disagreeable to themselves with every appearance of special pleasure. When Philibert asked my mother to gather together the clan, all the uncles and aunts and cousins on my mother’s side and my father’s, so that he might present to them his fiancée, my mother apparently felt obliged to meet his wishes, not quite understanding the need for so much fuss, suspecting perhaps the truth that the ceremony was a concession to that tiresome Mrs. Carpenter, yet determining once she had decided to do it, to do it nicely. Our relations in their turn recognized with the best possible grace the obligation she gently laid upon them in a series of little plaintive invitations to tea, and turned up smiling. Their smiles were various, there was plenty of variety in the family: we went in for cultivating our personalities; but there was nevertheless in the light of their expressive countenances a pleasant family resemblance, the stamp of a kinship that was cherished and valued. They all conveyed that it was for them at any time and without ulterior purpose an honour and a pleasure to be received by my mother, and that, however important the present occasion might be, the agreeable importance lay for them much more in finding her well than in meeting a stranger, her prospective daughter-in-law.

My mother, in marrying my father, had married a second cousin, so that the two sides of the family were representative of but one after all, and if within our own circle we admitted that the Joignys had in the last half century shown a more progressive spirit, had taken a more active interest in the affairs of the Republic, and had rubbed shoulders more freely with industrials and politicians than had the Mirecourts, the resulting difference felt was so slight, the nuance of manner and bearing so delicate, as to pass unperceived by the outer circle of society. We did not criticize each other. Some of the Joignys had made money, and one or two had married it. My father had been a royalist deputy, my Uncle Bertrand had been a Senator; on the other hand the Mirecourts had had an occasional relapse into the army and numbered even now a couple of cavalry officers. If there was among us a tacit understanding that the only thing worthy of us was to do nothing for the government we detested, we never said so, and never blamed any one of our members for succumbing to the temptation of seeking an occupation. We were privileged people who could afford to amuse ourselves with modern affairs if it so pleased us, and at the expense of society if this took our fancy. Our philosophy was vaguely speaking to live as we had always lived under the Kings of France, and yet to keep intellectually very much abreast of the times. We had an abundance of ideas about everything. Modernism in art did not displease the younger members. On the contrary it was one of our characteristics to keep our old customs and discover at the same time new movements in music, painting and literature. We considered ourselves not in the least musty or moth-eaten. On the afternoon that I speak of we produced an effect the reverse of dingy or dreary, an effect of subdued brightness, of sprightly gentleness of unmodish elegance. We looked and were sure of ourselves. Republican France beyond our doors did not disturb us. We knew that we were clever enough to get the best of it for another generation or two anyway. We had clung to our lands, our forests and our meadows. We would cling to them still. We trusted to our wits to preserve us from the clumsy clutch of democracy. In the pleasant sanctuary of our family mansion we made fun of the outside world.

My mother, looking very nice with a black lace scarf round her shoulders and her dark hair arranged in an elaborate pattern of close little waves and puffs, received the homage of my aunts, uncles and cousins with wistful vivacity, asking them all with little gusts of enthusiasm about their affairs, and then tenderly sighing as if to convey to them how sympathetic was her appreciation of all their rich activities, in which she asked their indulgence for playing so passive a part. It was the last occasion in which she was to receive in the house that had been already sold to allow Philibert to marry the girl who was to be on view that day, but my mother gave no sign of appreciating any irony or any sadness in the situation. If the little gathering represented for her a trial of some cruelty, she kept her sense of this perfectly disguised. With her boxes actually packed and her new modest apartment already cleansed and garnished preparatory to her arrival, she sat calmly and sweetly by the little wood fire at the end of the long suite of drearily august salons where she had known so many seasons of secluded temperate grandeur, holding a small embroidered screen between her face and the modest blaze of crackling birch logs. It was a cold November day. The rooms that had been thrown open were chilly. Not magnificent in size or in richness, but sparsely furnished, they were sufficiently vast to seem with their fifty odd occupants comparatively empty, and presented to the eye polished vistas of waxed parquet, bland expanses of delicate panelling and high, dimly gilded cornices that were multiplied in numerous long mirrors. The rooms, as I say, were cold, and they looked cold. The dull day was darkening rapidly beyond the long windows. The lighted candles on the chimney-pieces left about them wide vague pools of shadow and made pockets of gloom behind important pieces of furniture.

I remember feeling, while we waited for Jane, how beautifully all my relatives were behaving. There was in their modulated gaiety an absolute denial of discomfort or curiosity or suspense. Their gestures, their chatter, their light laughter, expressed a perfect oblivion of the lowness of the temperature round them, or the imminence of an ordeal for my mother, or the general consciousness that Philibert had done something unusual and was about to ask for their approval. They had put on frock-coats, some of them, and others had put on silk dresses, but their way of greeting each other signified that any little extra effort of toilet was made simply out of courtesy to the family. I remember thinking, as I observed them, that there was perhaps no other family in France that took so much pains to be pleasant within its own circle, and that really on the whole we succeeded very well. It came to me too, looking at _Tante_ Clothilde, _Tante_ Belle and _Tante_ Alice, and _Oncle_ Louis and old Stanislas and Jean and Paul and Sigismond, that it was comparatively easy for us because we were gifted. Yes, I admitted, we were certainly gifted. We understood music and some of us were very passable musicians ourselves; and then there was _Tante_ Suze who had translated Keats into French, and saintly _Tante_ Alice who restored Cathedrals and Jean who wrote plays and Sigismond who did bacteriological research. Our gifts and our occupations, quite apart from our amusements, gave us plenty to talk about. Actually it was not a charming make-believe; we did enjoy meeting. And of all this give and take of affectionate recognition, Claire my sister was the centre. The aunts and uncles and cousins adored Claire. She was the perfect product of their blood, and they understood her, and loving her they appreciated themselves and were conscious of the solidarity of their indestructible social unity. She meant even more to them than my mother because she was young, and since her unfortunate marriage she had for them the added charm of a martyr. If they had ever been willing to criticize my mother they would have blamed her for giving her daughter to such a man as my brother-in-law. There was not a man in the room who did not dislike him and who would not have taken up the cudgels for Claire at the slightest sign of her finger. The unpopular outsider was not there. He had perhaps understood that he was expected to stay away. Even an automobile merchant can be made to feel when he is not wanted. The poor brute’s skin was perhaps not as thick as they thought. No one, however, remarked on his absence. No one asked after him or mentioned his name. Had he behaved as he had been expected to behave, and had Claire wished it, they would have been kind to him, but he had made one or two mistakes, and Claire had shown no signs of wanting them to take him into their circle. He had taken her away to Neuilly, had almost literally locked her up there, and had offered to lend several of them money, at a high rate of interest. Also he had asked Bianca’s father, (who was there by the way that day, though Bianca was not), to get him into the Jockey Club. It had been impossible not to snub him. They all felt very sorry for Claire.

Philibert’s affairs were different. A man need never be the slave of his _ménage_. Philibert they knew could quite well look after himself. They had heard that the fortune of the young American was gigantic. Philibert would know beautifully how to spend millions, they said to themselves. That was one of the things that we, as a family, had always known how to do. They admitted willingly that Philibert was in his way eminently worthy of themselves. His faults were in keeping with their traditions; he had never made any of them blush. They trusted he was not about to do so now. They hoped the young American girl would not be too impossible. Some Americans whom they knew were charming, but it was not always the richest who were the nicest. Alas, one could not have everything. They would be kind to the child, however awful she might be. It was always worth while being kind, and besides did one really know how to be anything else to a woman? Had one, as a matter of fact, any bad manners tucked away anywhere to bring out on any occasion?

But of course, none of this appeared in their conversation, and as I say, no one could have detected in their manner any sign of curiosity or nervousness. And when at last the butler announced at the far end of the _Grand Salon_ “Madame Carpenter et Mademoiselle Carpenter,” it was with a scarcely perceptible shifting of positions and straightening of attention that they made a kind of circle extending out on either side of my mother, who rose from her chair by the fire in the inner apartment and advanced two steps towards the distant figures that appeared in the far doorway of the outer room.

I recognized Jane at once as the girl who has walked down my street, my cossack princess, my wild crowned creature of the steppes. She had a long way to go and she came on slowly and smoothly, with a lightness in her gait that had about it a certain grandeur and a dignity that seemed at the same time somehow rather shy and timid. She reminded me of some nervous creature who was accustomed to traversing vast tracks of open country and who might be frightened away by the stir of a twig. I saw in another moment that she was not frightened. She gave my mother the slightest and most correct of courtseys, and then stood quite still while her own mother talked to the lady who had so persistently and gently snubbed her. It was, however, to strike me very soon as one of the interesting things about Jane that, although she was not frightened when she first came in, she was beginning to feel so ten minutes later. I put this down as the first proof she gave me of being intelligent.

Mrs. Carpenter may have drained from that hour in our paternal mansion some deep draught of pleasure; I do not know. It is possible that she regarded her entry into our chilly drawing room as a social triumph; if so she betrayed no such feeling. She, too, as well as my mother, was capable of elegant dissimulation. Her rich black figure, marvellously moulded into its lustrous garment, was of a dignity that surpassed everything that quite put my gentle mother in the shade. I can imagine her full, bright consciousness of this. There was something in the poise of her high modish grey head that expressed astonishment as she shook hands with her little hostess. It was as if she marvelled that so unimpressive a woman, with really no pretensions at all to a figure, should hold such sway in the world. A good many of the others she knew. Some had eaten from her golden plates, others had left cards but not eaten, a few had invited her to “evenings.” She greeted them with an easy security of manner that was quite sufficiently a match for their own shriller effusiveness. If they were not inordinately pleased, well they seemed so, and if she was, then she did not show it. The comedy was well played by both sides.

She had dressed her daughter rather cleverly for the occasion. Jane had on a straight close-fitting costume of some mouse-grey material that had the texture of a suede glove. As I remember it, it was cut like a Russian jacket, trimmed with bands of grey fur, and topped by a close grey fur hat with a green cockade that matched her eyes. That was all; the dress was warm and plain, well adapted to the weather and to the girl’s age, and gave her no look of wealth. The most it did was to set off with severe modesty the splendid proportions of her strong young body.

What I think we all felt when Jane entered was the warmth and vitality of her youth. She was so very much more alive than all the rest of us that we could not help noticing it. We felt cold and dry beside her, and rather small. We were literally, almost all of us, smaller than she was. This was disconcerting: I caught actually on my mother’s face after the first presentation had taken place an almost comic expression, and could not make out what she was after as she looked quickly from one to the other, until I discovered that she was simply looking for some one to put next the girl who was tall enough to look well beside her. My mother had an eye for _tableaux vivants_; she did not like to see a woman towering above men. Not finding any one she was reduced to sitting down herself, and motioning the great long child to a stool at her knee. It was then that I realized Jane was growing frightened, and was struck by the keenness of her perceptions. There was nothing obvious to frighten her, and yet there was something in the air for a fine sensitive nostril to sniff at in alarm if it were fine enough; just the faintest whiff of antagonism, an antagonism tempered and mingled with curiosity, surprise and humour.

My family saw possibilities in Jane. Of that I became growingly conscious. It was evident in the way they eyed her with rapid sidelong glances, appraising tilts of the head, steps to the side to get a closer or different view, and in their murmured undertones. They did not discuss her then and there, they did not whisper, they were not rude, God forbid, but they showed that they were struck. She engaged their attention and was more of a person than they had bargained for. They looked from her to her mother and back again with lifted eyebrows. They were surprised to find that Mrs. Carpenter had such a daughter. It was clear to them that something could be made out of Jane.

The girl sat on her low seat quite still, one hand in her lap, the other hanging down by her side, and while she answered my mother’s questions, shot an occasional clear glance from under her eyebrows at the people around her. I saw that she was nervous, but not too nervous to take in a great deal. I was impressed by the amount she did seem to take in.

Philibert all this time hung off in a corner and watched her. She never once looked at him. She seemed determined not to do so. If he were putting her to some sort of a test she was obviously going to go through the ordeal without an appeal for aid. It was a fine performance; unfortunately no one but myself appeared to appreciate it.

Her nervousness evidently had something to do with her deep desire to please, and her increasing realization that these relations of Philibert’s were not people easily pleased with anything or any one. She felt that she was the object of a finer scrutiny than she had ever before undergone. Her eyes searched rapidly one face then another, and veiled themselves again under lowered lids. The one thing that might have consoled her in her sense of their superlative fastidiousness was, however, just the thing that she could not divine. She didn’t know that they none of them cared a fig for pretty doll faces and found her ugly strangeness a very good substitute. It had not yet dawned on her, in spite of her mother’s preaching, that her countenance was just the sort of thing that would have worth for sophisticated people.

I don’t remember just how long this part of the show lasted, or just how Philibert suddenly changed its character and made the whole thing seem like a circus performance with himself as ringmaster and his fiancée as the high-stepper whom he was showing off to the spectators, but that is nevertheless what happened.

I had taken a long look at my brother that day. It had come to me, watching the attention and respect with which my august uncles treated him, that perhaps I had never done him justice. It was obvious that they liked him and that he not only amused them vastly, but imposed himself on them. He had talked to them with even more than his usual brilliance, and all Paris knows what that means, and I had listened to his talk marvelling at the power of words. Paris can never resist words; France succumbs inevitably to talk. No one, I was forced to admit, was such a talker as Philibert. Like a consummate juggler keeping half a dozen ivory balls in the air, he played with ideas and phrases. Gaily he tossed up epigrams and paradoxes, let fly a challenge, caught it with a counter-challenge, argued two sides of a question, flung wide a generality, chopped it into bits in a second, was serious for two minutes, mimicked a public character, gave a sketch of the political situation, recounted a recent scandal. The faces of his auditors were a study. They were the faces of delighted spectators at a play. Positively I expected them now and then to applaud. My Aunt Suze was wiping her eyes, weeping with laughter. Uncle Louis was waving his handkerchief excitedly and ejaculating “_Parfaitement, parfaitement. Je vois cela d’ici._” Bianca’s father, his rubicund face wrinkled into a masque of comedy, was watching out of the corner of his sporting eye and muttering affectionately--“_Ah, le coquin, ah quel comédien._” And my dear little mother from her place by the fire was smiling shyly over her fire screen, her eyes filled with gentle adoration.

I have heard women rave about the fineness of Philibert’s features, the nobility of his nose, which was certainly a good and generous example of our high type, signs of the race in the drawing of his head. I suppose it is true that he had something special about his head. It was the same head after all that had hung on our walls for generations, capped by Cardinals’ bonnets and courtiers’ wigs. Nevertheless, when he called to Jane he looked suddenly like a ringmaster in a circus. With his little waxed moustache and his little perky coat-tails and his lightly gesturing hand positively creating in space the image and sound of a delicate long-lashed whip, he put Jane through her paces. He had her beautifully trained. He had done it all in a month. She was perfectly in hand.

At the sound of his voice she had sprung to her feet. Yes, it was a spring, quite sufficiently quick to startle my mother. Ha, but that was a mistake at the very beginning. She was made to turn and mutely apologize. Whist! she obeyed the sign and crossed to the venerable and monstrous Aunt Clothilde who sat like a large brown Buddha by the window. “A lower curtsey this time and kiss the plump old hand. Step backward now and smile at these gentlemen. Hold up your head. Right about turn, straight across the ring. Not too fast--proudly do it--show them how you can walk. Aha, what made you do that? No stumbling, mind you. High-steppers don’t look at their feet. Flip--just a flick of the lash to put more life into you.”

I watched fascinated. I watched till I could bear it no longer. I said to Claire--“Lead the way into the dining-room. Tea’s been ready this hour.” And Claire went forward gracefully and put an arm through the trembling creature’s and led her away from her master; but I saw the girl’s eyes ask for leave, and I saw him condescendingly grant it. By the tea-table I joined her, and heard the rattle of the cup in her hand against the saucer. She greeted me with a smile of extreme youthfulness that tried to conceal nothing. Looking down at me timidly from her splendid height, her pale countenance made me the frankest fullest confession and asked wistfully for help, and seemed presently to find relief.

“Philibert did not tell me there were so many of you,” she said quaintly in French.

“We are all here, every one of us,” I rejoined. “We rushed to welcome you.”

She accepted this in silence, and I saw her gaze travel across to my sister who stood in the window, and rest there with vivid interest.

“You admire my sister?” I asked in English.

“Immensely. I hope she will like me. If only she did I wouldn’t mind.”

“The others? But they all will.”

“Do you think so?”

“I am sure of it.”

She sighed and looked at me gravely. She seemed to be thinking deeply, and she seemed very very young.

“There are so many differences,” she said after a moment’s hesitation.

“Not so many as you imagine,” I protested.

“I don’t always understand what they mean,” and then with a quick lighting up of her expression--“You will interpret.”

“But you speak very excellent French,” I again objected.

“Ah, it wasn’t the language I meant,” was the reply that came from those grave parted lips.

Philibert at that moment approached and laid a finger on my shoulder. His words, however, were not addressed to me.

“Don’t you think,” he said lightly, “that such an absorbing tête-à-tête might be postponed to another day? It’s not very polite to your elders.”

I saw the poor girl quiver. I saw the slow flood of crimson mantle her face and forehead and flush to the tips of her ears. I saw her stare at my brother humbly, and then I watched her slink off at his side, like a great dog that he led by a chain and to whom he had given a whipping. The sight filled me with disgusting pain. I turned on my heel and joined Claire in her window.

“A pretty sight, isn’t it?” I spluttered.

“But, _mon cher_, she adores him.”

“Just so.”

My sister eyed me a little strangely.

“You don’t like that?” she asked.

“Do you?” I retorted.

She shrugged her shoulders and gave a little laugh. “Of course it would be still nicer,” she mocked lightly, “if he adored her as well. But what will you? Such is life?”

I felt how hopeless it was. I had a foretaste of how my sympathy for Jane was to isolate me.

“She admires you any way extravagantly,” I persisted with petulance. Claire only laughed.

“I should think she would do everything extravagantly,” was her reply as she floated away.

“Do be a little kind to the child,” I cried out after her, and she just nodded at me over her shoulder. How charming her face was seen thus, framed in her dark drooping hat and black furs, the slender glowing olive oval, the sombre eyes, the lovely teeth, how charming, how teasing, how elusive; and her slim figure with its trailing draperies, how easily it slipped away from all effort, all responsibility.

Jane was gone when I re-entered the drawing room. I gathered that she had made a favourable impression. Aunts and uncles and cousins were taking leave of my mother with phrases of congratulation.

“_Elle est charmante._”

“_Une taille superbe._”

“Philibert will dress her beautifully.”

“So young, so healthy.”

“Such nice manners.”

“And how she adores him, it’s quite touching.”

“Fifi always was lucky.”

The masculine element was almost vociferous.

“_Sapristi_, an enormous fortune, and a fine young creature like that.”

One by one they bowed over my mother’s hand, and went away. My mother looked very tired. She motioned me to remain. Claire hung over her tenderly.

“_Pauvre petite mère_,” she said, kissing the top of her head. “You must go straight to bed. All these emotions have been too much for you. I will come in the morning to see to the packing of the last things. Don’t stir. Just stay quiet. All the same, it’s too bad, her turning you out of your own house.”

I said nothing. Something warned me not to take up Jane’s defence just then, and I, too, felt sorry for my mother. When we were alone, she laid her head against the back of the chair and closed her eyes. Presently, however, without opening them she spoke with surprising energy.

“I have had to promise to dine with that woman,” was what she said.

VIII

Jane had made no impression on my mother. Mrs. Carpenter had made too much of one. She had deflected my mother’s attention from Jane to herself and this, with unfortunate consequences. Mrs. Carpenter affected my mother like a loud and unpleasant noise, and my mother hated noises more than anything in the world. I am not trying to be witty. I mean this literally. I have seen my mother grow pale with a sort of nervous nausea and close her eyes in a desperate effort to control the faintness that came over her at the sound of a harsh ugly voice raised in anger. There was something about Mrs. Carpenter that set her nerves on edge in the same way. Her metallic jingling clothes, her loose easy swagger, her wiry grey curls, her humorous rolling eye, made up an _ensemble_ that though to most people not seemingly at all “loud” gave my mother sensations of clashing and clanging. When she was about it was impossible for _Maman_ to think of or listen to any one else. All the effort of her hypersensitive nervous organism was concentrated on just simply bearing her, and she was obliged now to bear her often and for hours at a time. Mrs. Carpenter didn’t let her off. She had wanted to know my mother; she knew her now and she made the most of her.

During the weeks that preceded the wedding, Izzy was incessantly with my mother. She was in the highest of gay good humours. A big fashionable wedding to prepare for, she was in her element. Having achieved her ambition she professed to take it all as a joke. She treated the approaching marriage of her daughter as a great lark and wanted my mother to have her share of the fun. She consulted her about everything, submitted lists and samples of engraved invitations, dragged her to dressmakers who were preparing the trousseau and made her come and help open presents. I have a picture of my mother in a corner of Mrs. Carpenter’s drawing room, limp and pale in her black clothes, submerged in cardboard and tissue paper, while the indefatigable Izzy on her knees in the middle of the floor held up one object after another and gave vent to shouts of indiscriminate rapture or groans of unenlightened contempt. Poor, dreadful Izzy. She had such definite ideas about things. Her ignorance was confident and documented. She had priced every marble and bronze in Paris. No jeweller’s shop held any secrets for her. She was a connoisseur in lace. But the little tarnished faded treasures sent by some of our relatives to Philibert’s bride belonged to no such category, and were viewed with bewildered disdain. Antique furniture had never been seen in her own apartment, but she knew that cracked lacquer and tarnished gilding was respectable in tables and chairs. Beyond that she could not go. Her instinct had stood in the way of her desire to learn. She clung irresistibly to baubles and coveted with passion the massive silver tea service sent by Aunt Clo. I know that Aunt Clo hesitated between this and an exquisite Ingres drawing. I remember Izzy weighing the monstrous kettle in her hands, her face a study of shrewd gloating apprisal and her knee planted firmly on the face of a poor little Louis XV doll that had come from Aunt Marianne’s cabinet of XVIII century toys.

It was unfortunate that my mother was forced to assist at these séances, and that Jane herself was so often absent trying on clothes. The absence of the one and the ignorance of the other were proofs to my mother that neither knew how to behave. She judged Izzy as if she were a Frenchwoman and supposed that because the noisy creature did not know a treasure of art when she saw it that she most probably put her knife in her mouth. And so during those days that would have exhausted a much more robust woman than my mother, Izzy did, I believe, at the very beginning of Jane’s life with us, use up all the vitality that _Maman_ could dispose of on behalf of Philibert’s American family.

The dinner she was obliged to attend for which Mrs. Carpenter had collected two ambassadors and a slangy Duchess was the last straw. My mother had never been to such a dinner in her life, and I confess to a complete sympathy with her when she gasped out afterwards that it was incredible that she should have been preserved from such ordeals throughout her youth when she had enough energy to bear them, only to be subjected to them in her old age when she hadn’t. That dinner, with its ten courses, was the funeral feast of a relationship not yet born, but that might truly have come into being and flowered to full sweetness between the grave awkward girl in the straight white frock, and the little quivering lady whose twitching eyebrows and frightened hurried glances alone testified to her acute agony of soul. Poor _Maman_, poor Jane, poor Izzy. I was there. I saw, and I did not realize the full meaning. I did not realize how lasting the effect would be. I was on the contrary absurdly reassured because of Jane herself. I saw in her silence, her gravity, her perfect timid deference to my mother, a promise of future felicity. I gathered that she would never be guilty of publicly blushing for her own parent, but that she would and did appreciate mine. I was right in this, but I was wrong in believing that my mother would appreciate in her turn the tender tribute. I reckoned without her nerves, her weariness, her discouraged sense of being victimized and exposed, all the accumulations of her years of abhorrence of the thing that was now thrust upon her. She had complained so little that I had failed to understand how deeply humiliating to her were the circumstances of her son’s marriage. She considered it indisputably a _mésalliance_, and yet she was forced to appear to rejoice in it with indecent exhibitions of familiarity. Mrs. Carpenter not only had disregarded her request for a little family gathering but had evidently succumbed to the desire to show her to just those people who, not having yet seen her, would especially relish the sight. “Just as if, _mon cher_,” my mother wailed afterwards, “I were anything to look at. Fancy wanting to show me, a skimpy bundle of black clothes.” She had done violence to herself in going to that dreadful apartment in the Avenue du Bois, and the effort was too much for her. The place was too much for her. She never forgot it and, I believe she never looked at Jane without remembering those golden plates, those loud nasal voices, those large glasses full of crushed ice and green peppermint, those horrid scraping fiddles. To my mother such an evening was a souvenir to last her the rest of her days. The most she could do after that was not actively to dislike her daughter-in-law, and she seemed to achieve this by cultivating in all that concerned that young person a consistent vagueness. When people talked of Jane she only half listened and answered irrelevantly. Her phrase was always the same--“_Mais oui, elle est si gentille._” When Jane herself was there she would look absent-mindedly beyond her and put her phrase in another form and murmur--“_Comme vous êtes gentille._” Jane could never get any further than that. It constituted a barrier, graceful and light as gossamer, impenetrable as steel armour. All the girl’s longing to be loved and to please, all her naïve attentions, all her thoughtful plans for the older woman’s comfort, were met with the same sweet gentle vagueness. When she brought flowers, when she asked advice, when she put her motor at the other’s disposal, when she asked her to come to her, it was always--“_Comme vous êtes gentille_,” followed by a little plaintive sigh that the girl gradually came to understand. Even when she worked out and carried through all on her own, a scheme for adding considerably to my mother’s material ease, the formula was merely changed to “_Vous êtes vraiment trop gentille_” and finally when Jane’s baby was born, and she believed that at last her mother-in-law would show some warmth of feeling, the words that greeted her when she opened her eyes and saw the latter leaning over the bassinet, were--“Comme elle est gentille,” this time addressed to the slumbering infant.

I know that my mother tried to be kind to Jane, and I believe that she was never positively unkind, never at least during those first years of her marriage, but aside from the unpleasant pressure Mrs. Carpenter had brought upon her and that had given her a kind of chronic nervous depression in all that concerned Jane, there was also the fact that Jane was not the sort of person who would ever have appealed to her. My mother liked Bianca and had wanted her for a daughter-in-law; how then could she love Jane who was the antithesis of Bianca, and who by usurping Bianca’s place, so my mother put it to herself, brought the contrast constantly to her mind? I have heard my mother say that she liked people to be more interesting than they looked, and found it amusing to be with people whom she was led on by some subtle provocative charm to discover. She recognized this charm in Bianca without ever discovering the sinister meaning of it, and she felt that Jane showed too much and therefore promised too little. Jane was too big and too striking to please her. She made, to my mother’s eyes, too much of a display. My mother liked above everything “_mesure_.” Her favourite form of condemnation was to call a thing “_exagéré_.” What at bottom she cared most for in a person was their being “_comme il faut_.” I don’t believe that she ever went so far as to consider her daughter-in-law vulgar, but there were things about her that she would have called “_outré_.” If she had ever allowed herself to depart from the vague affectionate affability that she preserved so consistently and so bafflingly, she would have said, (perhaps she did say something of the kind to Claire, I know they discussed Jane between them) that there was something almost shocking in a young woman with such an ugly face having such a beautiful figure. They, Claire and _Maman_, would have liked the ugliness of the face better if it had not been held so high on such splendid shoulders. They would have forgiven Jane her profile if it had not been for her really marvellous hands and feet. In the same way they would have known better how to deal with the whole striking physical being if it had not gone with such shyness and such humility. What they could not make out, and found it hard to put up with, were her incongruities. Such looks should aesthetically have been combined with audacity and hardness. Instead they found on their hands a poor quaking creature of a pathetic docility who seemed to present to them on her lovely palms an exposed and visibly pulsating heart, that they didn’t know what to do with, didn’t want to touch, were positively afraid of. It seems strange, but it was nevertheless true that Jane frightened them. Her need of them exposed there quite simply to their gaze, her simple, inarticulate but all too visible desire to love them and be loved, made them turn away in a kind of flurry that was partly delicacy and partly fear. There was an intensity about her that opened dangerous and wearying vistas of emotion which they wished at all costs to avoid. Claire said to me one day--

“Mother is afraid Jane will crush her, throw herself on her, I mean, literally, and hug and squeeze her, and she doesn’t like physical contact of that sort, you know that.”

Of course I knew. We all knew. From our earliest years we had always approached _Maman_ as it were on tiptoe, delicately, as if she were made of some precious perishable stuff that would be broken at a rude touch. Our sense of this had been for us one of her subtlest charms. When she allowed us to kiss her we did so lightly and quietly. The touch of our lips on her hair or her soft worn cheek, was the fleeting pleasure of a winged instant, yet it was a pleasure; she had a way of conveying to it a quality, a fine quick elusive meaning. We never felt that we had been cheated, on the contrary, her kisses were rare and might have been deemed meagre, but they were beautiful. There was a grace in the way she laid her hand on one’s arm and drew one down that was more than artistry; it conveyed a sense of something precious that had never been vulgarized by handling and mauling. I do not remember her ever folding any of us in her arms, and if my memory of her demonstrations is particularly acute because they were more often for Claire or for Philibert than for me, that only proves that I know what I mean and in no way diminished the beauty of what I was so often able to observe from my distance. The act of opening wide her arms would have been extraordinary in my mother. I never saw it. With Claire who was the person in the world to whom she was closest, I often noticed how delicate and restrained was her manner, and yet somehow with scarce any demonstrations of affection, they conveyed to each other an infinite tenderness. They were constantly together, they talked everything over. Claire had, I believe, no secrets from _Maman_. They depended on each other. Together they tasted the ineffable sweetness of almost perfect communion. And yet I never saw them cling together, I never surprised them in each other’s arms. So strangely alike, so perfectly in harmony, they reminded me sometimes of characters on the stage, two figures in some graceful pantomime who had been drilled to make the same gestures in time to the same music and who moved always through the close articulate measure of their parts in perfect unison, tracing parallel patterns in the space round them, mysteriously united yet never touching and scarcely ever looking at each other.

Such an impression I sometimes had in the old days when I still lived in the bosom of the family, and now, as a kind of moral outcast, looking back I find even more in it than I did then. I see them not so much as actors who had learned a part, but almost as hypnotized beings who, whether they wished it or not, were bound to move and act and speak in a certain way. What it all comes to, I suppose, is that they were the fine perfect products of a system that held their individualities chained. So perfectly representative of their class, of their race, of the discriminative intolerant idea of their forebears, as to have been born with a complete set of gestures and prejudices and preferences and vocal intonations all ready for them, existing in them regardless of their own volition. I see them as the slaves of a hyper-sensitive, super-subtle inheritance, and I understand that with them many things were more truly impossible than with most people. It was impossible for them to make an ugly abrupt movement. The strong occult force of their breeding controlled their limbs and gave them a kind of grace that if one watched carefully was reminiscent of heavy powdered wigs and unwieldy panniers. It was impossible for them to mingle in crowds or walk along the street or take an interest in public affairs. It was impossible for them to look at the public without scorn or subject themselves to the physical contact of poor people in crowded trains. Instinctively they manœuvred to hide themselves from the eyes of the public. It was really as if they had lived under another régime and could not quite realize this one.

How could I not understand what Claire meant when she said that _Maman_ was afraid that Jane would crush her? Jane was no reincarnation of some spoiled beauty of another century. If she represented any one but her glorious healthy self, it was more likely a Red Indian princess or a blond Norse amazon. Jane had not learned in a previous existence how to conceal one set of feelings and delicately convey another. She did not even know that such feats were expected of her. She would learn, but it would take time. For the moment she was just obviously what she seemed, a brave ardent young thing, capable of all sorts of mistakes. She would come in with her long beautiful stride and tower over my mother and sweep down to her; to Claire it seemed like swooping not sweeping, and my mother would huddle in her chair and struggle against the inclination to shut her eyes, and then the confused, intimidated, glowing creature in the marvellous clothes of Philibert’s designing, would sit dumbly, wistfully, waiting and wanting something, anything in the way of a crumb of comfort; would watch for any sign of unstudied natural joy at her presence and would accept in its place the pleasant flow of my mother’s vague affability, and would go away humbly, to come back the next day with an offering, flowers or a book or some precious little gift, and always my mother would say--“_Comme vous êtes gentille._”

And besides all this the things that Jane and Philibert did were not calculated to amuse my mother in the least. She had never cared about public shows, and had always considered the fine art of entertaining to exist in the number of people one eliminated. Philibert’s enormous parties, his balls, his dinners of a hundred couples, his fantastic “_Fêtes Champêtres_,” dismayed her. She thought they were Jane’s parties. It was Jane whom she held responsible for all that was spectacular in the brilliant existence of her son; it was Jane she blamed for the phenomenal marble Paris mansion. It would have been impossible to have explained to her that Jane had scarcely glanced at the plans of the house when Philibert presented them to her. She refused to go to any of their parties. Her dislike of magnificence was a part of her deep absolute view of what was “_comme il faut_.” Magnificence was suitable to crowned heads, and though she would not have admitted that anything was too good for her son, she did not like to see him playing at being a king, and perhaps because all her life she had cherished a loyal personal sentiment for the destitute Orleans family, taking their political mourning for her own, it filled her with horror to find her son surrounded by all the trappings of an actor monarch and scattering largesse to the rabble, in a way her impoverished, unrecognized, exiled sovereign could not do. His enormous house, which she persisted in believing to be Jane’s, depressed her. The really phenomenal harmony of its richness escaped her. The regal vistas of its apartments, all warmed and glowing and made by her son’s consummate artistry habitable left her cold. The fine tapestries, the riot of blended colour, the audacious effects of light and shadow, the profusion of precious lustrous silks and gleaming brocades, wearied her gaze. Knowing well enough, who better, good things when she saw them, there were here too many to look at. I have pathetic memories of her shrunken black figure tripping through those immense chambers on Philibert’s arm. I see her pass with little pattering steps across the endless expanse of polished floor, her lorgnon to her eyes, her head turning this way and that with quick bird-like movements, pretending to look at everything while refusing to see anything at all. The size of the place oppressed her and made her suspicious. She could not believe that such enormous rooms could be full of fine little treasures. Her experience told her that fine pieces were rare and were kept under glass, and were not to be bought, save at a price. Even Jane’s fortune, which she had been so often made to feel was too much for good taste, could not in her opinion have filled that house with genuine things. Her son had been led astray. He was guilty of imitation. If he took her straight up to a gem of a cabinet and made her scrutinize it, well, she admitted its existence, but what was one cabinet in a room where there were twenty? She was in her way incorrigible. She did not believe in miracles, and while the rest of Paris was gaping it only made her feel dreadfully tired to be so put upon. That was her real feeling about the gigantic mansion. It made her feel tired. She was obliged to take the grand staircase slowly and stop on each landing. With her hand on the polished marble balustrade she toiled up it panting, gently catching her breath in the presence of mocking marble fauns and disdainful goddesses. Dear little fragile figure, growing smaller and more bent with time in her unmodish garments and simple black bonnet, fine proud gentle lady, I believe in the bottom of her heart she was sometimes afraid one of the army of constantly changing footmen would mistake her identity and show her to the housekeeper’s room. It was the sort of thing she would have taken as a horrid joke with a dreadful moral.

I find that I am taking a vast deal of trouble and time in explaining my own family, and seem to be getting absolutely no nearer my goal, that is the heart of Jane’s own problem. And yet I am sure it was all a part of it. In going into my mother’s feelings in such detail, I do so because of what happened later, and I sometimes wonder whether perhaps my mother foresaw what was going to happen and knowing whichever way it turned out that she was going to take Philibert’s part, made up her mind at the outset that it would all be much simpler if she never gave Jane any encouragement to expect anything else. Her attitude of increasing aloofness as time went on becomes more explicable if one interprets it as an anticipation of trouble. Heaven knows trouble was obvious enough to anybody who was interested. Weren’t there bets on at the club as to how long Philibert would stand it, that is, his enforced conjugal felicity? And other bets as to how long it would take his wife to find out certain things that every one else knew? It required no special prophetic gift to foresee that some day something was bound to happen, and I am sure my mother foresaw it. But I am a little puzzled as to why Philibert himself chose to make matters worse by keeping his wife and mother estranged, for I am perfectly sure that if Philibert had wanted my mother to love Jane, she would have done it, simply because she always did what he asked her. And again, if _Maman_ had brought herself to care for Jane, she would have influenced her and guided her; she might even have prevented her from precipitating a crisis. One would have thought Philibert would have availed himself of such aid. But no, that was not his idea. His idea was quite other. He wanted his mother to dislike his wife for reasons of his own, or, at any rate, he did not want any understanding intimacy to exist between the two. On the other hand he asked Claire to make friends with her and help him with her education. And he seemed content that Jane and Bianca should be friends. Was this because he knew Claire would never care for Jane, however much she saw of her, and was afraid my mother might? I don’t know, I am not sure. There are aspects of the case that grow more obscure the more I think of them.

As for Bianca--and Jane--that I learned about afterwards.

IX

Claire was a person who attracted people to her in spite of herself, even those people whom she did not like. It had been so in the case of Jane. My sister charmed more often than not without wanting to do so. People in general were to her uninteresting and indiscriminate admiration annoyed her. She was constantly worried by having to snub would-be admirers who bored her. It was generally accepted in the family that she was the victim of her own charm, and we often half-laughingly commiserated with her. My mother once quite seriously said, “_Cette pauvre_ Claire, with whom every one is in love and who cares for no one, it is really very tiring for her.”

Jane’s devotion was to her from the first unwelcome, though for a year or two she put up with it kindly enough. When Philibert asked her to help him with Jane’s education, she replied that she already had four children of her own to bring up, but she nevertheless let Jane go about with her, gave her advice about people and clothes, let her do errands for her; and in a mild way returned the girl’s demonstrations of affection, but it all bored and worried her. There was for her no pleasure in being adored by a young woman whom she found to be stupid. She did not on the whole care much for women, and often said she did not believe in their friendship. Her need of affection was abundantly supplied to her in her own family. Between her mother and her children she found all the tenderness she required; in society she asked merely to be amused. At bottom she was a confirmed cynic. Human nature appeared to her unsympathetic and pitiable. Her family represented for her a refuge from a world that disgusted her more than it interested. There was for her something ultimate and absolute in the ties of blood that gave to the members of a family, all of them mere ordinary human beings, a special precious significance for each other. If she had ever analyzed it she would have said--“But of course I know that _Maman_ and Philibert and Blaise and _Tante_ Marianne are no different from other people, but that does not matter, they are different for me. It’s not that I believe in my brothers as men, it’s that I believe in their relationship to me, and that, is the only thing I do believe in. Philibert may be the most selfish man in Paris; nevertheless he would not be selfish to me. That’s all, and that is enough. I don’t believe in men. I don’t believe in women. I don’t believe in myself or in love or happiness, but I believe in my family.” But of course she never did so express herself. She was not given to talking about herself.

Philibert realized from the first that Claire was necessary to his scheme, and somehow or other he prevailed upon her to exert herself on his behalf. She was constantly at his house and became its chief ornament, and one of its most potent attractions. Jane had her place, usually at the top of the staircase, but Claire’s corner was the corner people looked for. Always more quietly dressed than any one else, (and I believe that Philibert planned the contrast of Jane’s gorgeous brocades with an eye to the dramatic effect of the two women) my sister created about her an atmosphere, a hush, a kind of breathless attention. I have seen her often appear in one of those great doorways, a slim, shadowy figure, in trailing grey draperies, and stand there silently while gradually her presence made itself felt, drew all eyes to her and created a feeling among the assembled people that a new charm, a finer quality, had been conveyed to the atmosphere by her being there. Wonderful Claire, clever Philibert; they played beautifully into each other’s hands. I do not mean that they were coldly calculating in regard to each other. On the contrary, their mutual admiration gave them, each one, the warmest affectionate glow. They rejoiced each in the rare qualities of the other, and Claire, knowing that in Philibert’s house she would find men worthy of appreciating her, knowing too, that no artist could so set off her full value as her brother, seemed unlike my mother to derive a certain amount of half-cynical amusement from what went on in that mansion. It is, of course, possible that at bottom she was no more averse to lunching “_dans l’intimité_” with royalties than was Mrs. Carpenter. In any event, princes of royal blood paid court to her in Philibert’s salons. And Philibert was right when he placed her beside him in that house. She made it _comme il faut_. Her presence was to it a benediction.

It had taken three years to build Philibert’s palace, and by the time it was finished, Claire had prevailed upon her husband to move into Paris and buy there a very nice house of his own. On the whole, things had turned out for her better than any of us had expected. Six years of what he would have called I suppose conjugal bliss had tempered the ardour of my brother-in-law, who had to his wife’s immense relief begun to look elsewhere than in his home for his pleasures. Though she had never complained of her slavery and now never spoke of her freedom, we all knew what had happened and were relieved. My mother was delighted. “_Enfin_, he hasn’t killed her,” was her way of expressing it to me. “The poor child is prettier than ever, and she manages so as not to be talked about.” What it was that she managed I had no reason for asking. If Claire was happy, if at last she had selected some one from among her numerous admirers whom she could love and who was beautifying her life for her, then all was well. I had no fault to find with her there. My mother’s reading of the case seemed to me the true one. My mother had suffered over her daughter’s marriage, and was glad to have some one make up to her child some part of the joy of life she deserved.

All this was quite satisfactory. It never occurred to any one of us to disapprove of Claire. How could we? Why should we? Had she done anything preposterous like running away with a footman we should still have stood by her. As it was she remained one of the most admired women in Paris, and the least talked about, and her sentimental life was for us a vague rather romantic secret realm which we took for granted and respected. We never pryed into her affairs, and when one day Philibert, in my mother’s drawing room, twitted Claire with the fact that her beauty increased in proportion to her husband’s infidelities, she merely laughed shyly and said nothing, knowing well enough that we expected no explanation. The episode would certainly have passed unnoticed, if Jane’s face had not shown it to be for her a moment of quite terrible revelation. It was, I remember, on a Sunday afternoon. We had all been lunching with my mother, Philibert, Jane, Claire and I, and were sitting by the fire with our coffee cups. Philibert, with his coat-tails over his arms, standing on the hearthrug, had been quizzing me. He was in excellent spirits, having just brought off some one of his social coups--I think it was the Prince of Wales that week who had dined with him, and Philibert was particularly pleased with Claire. His little sally had been meant and received as a token of affection. Unfortunately he had forgotten Jane; or it may be that he had not forgotten her and had spoken deliberately. It is possible that he thought the time had come to carry her education a step further. He probably felt it tiresome to be always on his guard as to what he said in her presence for all the world as if she were a _jeune fille_. She had heard and continued to hear in the houses she frequented, enough talk of all kinds, heaven knows, to enlighten her as to the habits of our world, but for all that we had instinctively all of us in her presence been careful of what we said to each other. It was, I suppose, our tribute to her innocence, or perhaps even to our fear of her judgments. More than once I, for one, had stammered under the gaze of her candid eyes and had swallowed the words that were on the tip of my tongue. On this occasion the phrase spoken would not have struck me as dangerous. I did not look at Jane to see how she took it. I merely happened to be facing her on the sofa and couldn’t help seeing the pallor that mantelled her face like a coating of wax. It was like that, not as if she had grown pale because of the ebbing of blood from her face, but as if a kind of coating of misery and fear had visibly enveloped her in whiteness. For a moment I did not understand, and failed to connect Philibert’s words with her aspect. “But, Jane,” I exclaimed, “what is it? Are you ill?” Fiercely she motioned me to be silent, gripping my arm with her strong hand so as to hurt me, and conveying somehow without speaking, for she could not speak, that she wanted me not to attract the attention of the others. Unfortunately Philibert had taken it all in. He may have been watching for the effect of his speech. His next words and his general behaviour give colour to such a theory. He literally jumped forward toward her across the carpet.

“But, my poor child,” he cried out derisively, “don’t make up a face like that. It’s most unpleasant. _Voyons_, what a way to behave in your mother-in-law’s drawing-room. If I had known you were so stupid, I should have left you at home.”

Those were his words. They were uttered with animation, with an almost ferocious gaiety, and to accompany them he tweaked her playfully but not gently by the ear. I got up from my place beside her, feeling myself flush to my hair. I turned my back to get away from the sight of that cowering creature huddling back from the hand that held her.

Exaggerated? Certainly she was exaggerated. Idiotic? Perhaps so. Understand her? Of course I didn’t. It was not until long after that I began to understand her. It was enough for me at that moment to understand Philibert and perceive that never, even if she lived with him for twenty years and maintained intact the dignity of her honesty, would he respect her.

Claire had been a passive spectator of this little passage between husband and wife. A slight flush had mounted to her cheek, a flush I took to be of annoyance, for she rose a moment later with more than usual abruptness and kissed my mother good-bye, ignoring completely the other two, not so much as looking at them as she made for the door. Jane, however, was too quick for her, and wrenching herself free from Philibert, was upon her before she turned the door knob.

“Don’t go like that,” she cried, “don’t be annoyed. I know he was joking. I know he did not mean it.” She seemed to be trying to grasp Claire in her arms, to get hold of her, to cling to her. I had a confused impression of something almost like a scuffle taking place between the two women, and of Claire actually throwing her off. I may be wrong. It may have been merely the expression on Claire’s face and the tone of her voice that sent Jane backwards. I don’t know, but it was quite pitifully horrid, and again I turned away my eyes, and with my back to them heard Claire say in her coldest tone, and God knows how cold her lovely voice can be--

“Ne soyez pas grotesque, je vous en prie. Laissez-moi partir.”

I do not mean to suggest that I sympathized with Jane that afternoon, for I did not. It was all too absurdly out of proportion. She had created out of nothing, out of the blue, a scene in my mother’s drawing-room, and one had only to look at the little delicate crowded place to know that scenes were abhorrent there. I believe actually that a small table full of trinkets had been overturned in Jane’s rush for the door, and I know that a coffee-cup was broken. It was the sort of thing one simply never had conceived of. My mother’s nerves were very much upset, and when Jane turned to her after Claire had shut the door in her face, wanting to beg her pardon, _Maman_ could only wave her hands before a twitching face and say, “No, no, my child. Don’t say any more, it is enough for today.”

After that I did not see Jane for some weeks. Neither she nor Philibert came to lunch with my mother the following Sunday, nor the Sunday after. On the third Sunday Philibert came alone and explained briefly that Jane was indisposed. He seemed preoccupied. He talked little, ate nothing, and drank a number of glasses of wine as if he were very thirsty. His lips twitched constantly, forming themselves into a kind of snarl, and he was continually jerking the ends of his moustaches. I remember thinking that he looked for all the world as if he wanted to bite some one. He had never appeared more cruel. I began to have a sickening foreboding. Claire eyed him strangely. I wondered if she had something of my feeling. How I wished she had!

It all came out after luncheon. He could not contain himself. He was beside himself with exasperation. Jane’s stupidity was too colossal. He could not put up with being loved like that any longer. She had made him a scene after the absurd affair of the other day and had asked him to swear that he would never be unfaithful to her. Here he raised his eyebrows, hunched his shoulders and threw out his hands. It was incredible how she had gone on. She had said that she had been thinking over his remark to Claire and was frightened by it, that when he had spoken so lightly of his brother-in-law’s infidelities it had come to her as a tremendous shock that such a thing was possible. An abyss had opened before her--that was her word. How could Claire go on living with a man who was unfaithful? She could not understand. What did he mean by her sister’s growing more beautiful in proportion to her husband’s infidelities? Had he meant anything, or was it only a joke? Did Claire know her husband made love to other women? She loved Claire, she thought her wonderful, but she didn’t understand. And so on and so on.

Philibert recited it all to us. His voice grew shriller and shriller. He piled up phrase after phrase in a crescendo of exasperation until he burst into a loud laugh with the words--“She talks, she talks of our marriage being made in Heaven.” He grasped his head in his hands.

Claire’s face wore a sneer.

“She professes not to know then, how it was her mother made it?” she asked.

Philibert came as it were to a halt. He looked at us all one after another. His face was of a sudden impudent, cool, smooth. He began to explain lucidly.

“Imagine to yourself, she really did not know it. She believed it was a love match. She believed it till yesterday, I mean last night, or it may be it was this morning, I don’t remember looking at the time. Anyhow, as she wouldn’t let me sleep I told her. I told her all about it.”

“I don’t believe she didn’t know,” said Claire.

He took her up quickly. “There, my dear, you are wrong, and you miss the whole meaning of her boring character.” He was enjoying himself now, was my brother, dissecting a human being was one of his favourite pastimes. In the pleasure it now afforded him to analyze Jane, he forgot for the moment his personal annoyance.

“One must remember,” he mused, “that she is a savage, with the mentality of a Huguenot minister. If you could hear her talk of the sacrament of marriage! She is of a solemnity, and her ideals, _Mon Dieu!_ what ideals! She once said to me that her grandfather loved her grandmother at the day of his death just in the same way that he loved her on the day of her wedding. When I replied ‘How very disgusting’ she merely stared and left the room. She is always quoting her grandmother and her Aunt Patty. What a background--I ask you? St. Mary’s Plains! It would appear that in St. Mary’s Plains they always marry for love and live together in endless monotony. Faithfulness--she is in love with faithfulness; purity too, she thinks a great deal of purity. In fact she has a most unpleasant set of theories. They fill up her brain. There is no room for reality. What goes on before her eyes means nothing to her. No, Claire, you are wrong. She knew nothing of her mother’s bargaining with me for her little life. Believe it or not, it is true. She married me for myself and believed the good God sent me to her, and my revelations were a shock. Impossible she should have simulated the emotion they caused her. The finest actress in the world could not have done it. I admit that as a piece of acting it would have been a fine performance. On the stage I would have enjoyed it, but in one’s own bedroom, the conjugal bedroom--ugh! no.”

“What did she do?” asked Claire.

“She leaned up against the wall, face to the wall, I mean, flattened against it, her hands high above her head, palms on the wall, too, as if she were reaching up to the ceiling.”

“I don’t see anything wonderful in that.”

“It was a fine picture,” said Philibert. “But she stayed there too long. She stayed like that some minutes. In fact I went on talking for a long time to that image, that long back and those outstretched arms. It reminded one of a crucifixion, modern interpretation. I was not sure that she was not dying and expected her to fall backwards.”

My mother had been fussing nervously with her shawl, her sleeves, her hair, giving herself little pats and tugs and looking this way and that. Her face was drawn and working. She kept moistening her lips and saying--“Is it possible? Is it possible?” She now broke in and cried plaintively--

“But, my son, all this is terrible. I do not understand. What was it you told her?”

“I told her quite simply, mother dear, that I had married her for her money, that I had managed it all with Mrs. Carpenter before I had ever seen her; (Old Izzy is done for with Jane now, I am afraid, but that can’t be helped) that I was tired of making love to her and would be grateful if she would become less exacting.”

“_Mon Dieu, Mon Dieu!_” wailed my mother. “Was it necessary to do anything so definite? Couldn’t you have gradually--_enfin_, does one say such things?”

“No, one does not, not in a civilized world, but Jane isn’t civilized. You’ve no idea what it is with her.”

Claire had risen and wandered away to the window with her usual drifting nonchalance.

“_Et après?_” she asked over her shoulder. “What did she say afterwards, when you had finished?”

“She said nothing, she fell down in a swoon.”

“Backwards?”

“No, she had turned and was standing with her back to the wall and her hands against it, leaning forward and glaring, rather like a tiger, ready to spring when I had finished. But she didn’t spring. When I mentioned a certain evening before our marriage on which I had taken her to the Opera, the queer light went out of her eyes. It was like snuffing out a candle. Then she fainted. I had to call her maid. It was two hours before she came round. She faints as she does everything else, too much, too much. _Quel tempérament, tout de même._ You have no idea what it is to live with her--and at the same time so fastidious. Certain things she won’t put up with. Professes a horror of--of the refinements of sentiment. A prude and a _passionnée_. Ah, it is all too difficult. Anyhow, it is finished, thank God for that.”

At this _Maman_ wailed out--“Finished? What do you mean, finished?”

Philibert laughed. “I only mean that she won’t bother me any more; not that she’ll leave me. Ah, no, she won’t leave me.” He ruminated; after a moment he sighed. “And I may be wrong, she may bother me after all, in a new way, in a new way. She is very obstinate. She may try to make me love her, now that she knows I don’t. It all depends on whether she hates me or not. One never can tell. And, of course, she knows nothing but what I have told you. It never occurs to her that I could be like other men. Even now she doesn’t suppose that her husband is unfaithful, and even now I imagine that fact will be of some importance to her. It is all very curious. I have told you in order to warn you. It is quite possible that she will come to you for help.”

He pulled down his cuffs, twisted his moustaches into place, looked at himself in the glass over the chimney piece, and bent over my mother, kissing the top of her head.

“_Au revoir, Maman chérie._ Don’t let her worry you. Just quiet her down a little. But if it tires you to see her, of course you needn’t. I only suggest it for her sake, and for us all. She will settle down. Au revoir.”

He went to Claire and spoke to her in an undertone. I saw her shake her head. “_Non_,” I heard her say. “_Je ne peux pas. Tout cela mécœure._ Elle est vraiment trop bête.” He shrugged his shoulders. For me he had no word of instruction, nor any of good-bye. From the window I watched him cross the pavement to his limousine. For a moment he stood, one patent leather foot on the step of the car, talking to his footman and arranging as he did so the white camelia in his buttonhole. His face was bland. His top-hat had a wonderful sheen. We all knew where he was going. Bianca had returned to Paris after a six months sojourn in Italy and had refused to go back to her husband. The connection for us was obvious. We had been aware for some time of the renewed intimacy of these two.

Philibert waved his gloves at me through the window of his limousine and grinned. A new light dawned on me. It had all been a comedy. He had done it on purpose. Bianca had put him up to it. If it had not been for Bianca, he would never have precipitated a crisis with Jane. All that about her affection being insufferable was nonsense. It was in his interest that his wife should adore him, and no one when left to himself could look after his own interests so well as Philibert. In quarelling with Jane he had done something from his own point of view incredibly foolish. Had Bianca not interfered he would never have done it. But what was she up to? That was the question. How should I know? Who on earth could ever tell what Bianca had hidden away in that intriguing Italian mind of hers? That she meant no good to any one, of that I was certain.

When I turned away from the window, Claire was stroking my mother’s hand. She looked at me inimically. Something in my face must have betrayed me, though I said nothing. “Don’t ask me to sympathize with Jane,” she brought out, “for I can’t. I wash my hands of the whole affair.”

My mother’s look was kinder than Claire’s. Her eyes held that proud plaintive sweetness that denied all passion, either of anger, reproach, or pity. Her face was very white and her eyelids reddened, but her remark was characteristic.

“She has her own mother to go to, and her own mother to thank if she is unhappy.”

And with that she drew me down to her with one of her beautiful gestures, and kissed me. I must have been in a highly excited and unnatural state of mind by this time, for the rare caress, so often awaited in vain, aroused in me at that moment a vague suspicion. Was she too, I remember asking myself, afraid I would try to get her to help poor Jane? If so her fears were unnecessary. Jane did not go to them. Philibert had been mistaken in thinking that she would rush to them for help. The time was to come when they would go to her, but of that later. She spoke to no one of her trouble, and neither Claire nor my mother laid eyes on her for months. We heard later that she had gone to Joigny with Geneviève, her little girl. She stayed at the Château de _Sainte Clothilde_ all summer alone. Long afterwards I found out that she had not even so much as spoken to her own mother. Jane never reproached Mrs. Carpenter, never opened her lips on the subject to any one, until the other day when she told me everything. Poor old Izzy died the following winter, in ignorance of what her daughter thought about it all.

X

I am no fatalist. I do not believe that the good God has ordered to be written down in a book what all the millions of little souls on the earth are to be doing this day a year hence. He, no doubt, in his wisdom has a general idea of such coming events as famines, earthquakes, wars and pestilences, but man must remain full of surprises for his Maker; his activities are incalculable, and tiny circumstances, the effect of his minute will, have a way of spoiling the fine large trend of the great cumulative power of the past that we call fate. It is true that such characters as Bianca and Philibert have about them the quality of the inevitable. Certainly, as compared to Jane, they were not free people. They were the children of an old and elaborate civilization, and impelled by obscure impulses that they themselves never recognized and that had their source in some dim dark poisonous pocket of the past.

Bianca, more than any women I have ever known, seemed fated to be what she was and to do as she did. She appears to me now as I remember her as the little white slave of the powers of darkness. But she liked her darkness. She dipped into it deeper and deeper. She sank of her own will and because of her own morbid and insatiable curiosity.

But Jane was free. One had only to be in her presence to feel it. No morbid complexes in her, one would have said. Compared to her we were like so many pigmies in chains, and Bianca beside Jane was like a ghost or a woman walking in her sleep. Of course Bianca hated Jane. I don’t believe in their friendship. As it was, I found it disgusting of Philibert to let Jane go about with Bianca. And Bianca must have been pretending to care for Jane out of perversity. Their natures were as antipathetic as their looks were opposed. Bianca with her little snow-white vicious face, so white that it showed pale bluish lights and shadows, her eccentric emaciated elegance of body, her enormous blue eyes fringed by their thick eyelashes that were like bushes and that she plastered with black till they stuck together: Jane, magnificent young animal, strong child amazon, towering shyly above us, looking down on us with her serious wistful gaze, holding out her marvellous hands to Bianca, suspicious of nothing, wanting to be friends--Jane insists that they cared for each other--I can’t admit it. Of course Bianca hated her, and the fact that until she saw Jane’s hands she had seen no others so beautiful as her own made it no easier for Jane, for Bianca may have been a priestess of the occult powers of darkness, she was as well a vain and envious young woman. A cat, Fan Ivanoff called her simply.

On the other hand I believe that if Paris had not mixed itself up in the long duel between these two women it might have ended less tragically, at any rate less tragically for Jane. Had they lived in London or Moscow or New York it would have been different. They would not have been so conspicuous. The vast and impersonal life of a great community would have absorbed them. But Paris held them close and watched them. It held them for twenty years. If they went away for a time they always came back and met face to face and could not get away from each other, for Paris is small and Paris is more personal than any city in the world. It is a spoiled beauty, excessively interested in personalities. I speak now of Paris, the lovely capricious creature that has existed for centuries, that has kept the special quality of its bland sparkling beauty through invasions, revolutions and massacres, and is still elegant under the dominion of the most bourgeois of governments. I speak of the Paris that seems to me to possess a soul, the soul of an immortal yet mortal woman, seductive pliable, submissive and indestructible. Do I sound fantastic? I have communed with my city for years, at night and in the morning and at mid-day. I have been a lonely man wandering through its streets and it has confided to me its secrets. Most often at night, when all the little people that inhabit its houses are asleep, I have listened, and like a sigh breathing up from its silvery bosom, I have heard its voice and understood its whispered confidences that carry a lament for days that are gone and are full of the tales of its many amours. Ah, my worldly-wise beauty, mistress of a hemisphere, what you do not know of men is indeed not worth knowing. And still they come, covetous, lustful, enamoured. What crimes have they not committed, what birthrights not denied, what fortunes not wasted, what fatherlands not repudiated, to win your favour?

It was this Paris that took part in the affair of Jane and Bianca. Why not? How could it have done otherwise? It has always been attracted by intrigue. It has a taste for drama. I repeat it dotes on personality; any personality that is striking, that catches its attention. The type matters little. Having long ago substituted taste for morals it has no ethical prejudices. It does not dislike a bandit; it adores a _farceur_ such as Philibert. It delights in demagogues and artists and men of intelligence whether they are criminals or saints. Once in a hundred years, like a woman surfeited with pleasure and sensation, it will respect a person of character.

Bianca and Philibert were true children of Paris. They were its spoiled and petted darlings and they knew this and laid store by it. At bottom it was Paris that Philibert was continually making love to. He had a quite inordinate liking for his city, a jealous proprietory affection. I believe that had he been exiled from it, he would have died, and I believe that his desire to curry favour with it was the motive of most of his actions. It was for Paris that he gave his wonderful parties and concocted his fanciful amusements. He treated it literally as if it were his mistress. He cajoled, he flattered, he bullied, he caressed, and he spent on it millions, Jane’s millions. It was not merely an ordinary vanity that impelled him. He saw himself as the benevolent despot of Paris, its favourite lover and its protector. To add to its brilliance he enticed to it princes and celebrities from every country of Europe. Europe was to him nothing more than a field to be exploited for the amusement of Paris. He would have beheld every city in Germany, Austria, Russia or Italy razed to the ground without a twinge of regret or horror, but when in 1914 the Germans were marching on Paris, then he was like a man possessed. I can remember him, white to the lips, rushing in from Army Headquarters to see the Archbishop. He had had long before any one else the idea of piling sandbags round Notre Dame to protect the stained glass windows. He was like a maniac.

As for Bianca, she was unique and Paris wore her like a jewel. The fact that she was half Italian seemed strangely enough not to mitigate against her, though her mother, the wonderful bacchante who had become in memory a legendary figure, had found it at first none too easy to please, according to Aunt Clothilde. The Venetian had been a woman of quick passions and child-like humours. She was remembered for her many love affairs, the garlands of bright flowers she wore in her hair, and the habit she had of sticking pins into little wax effigies of people she wished would die. An impulsive, playful, improvident creature, with the beauty of a peasant and the naïveté of a child. She had died when Bianca was a child of six, died of home-sickness so they said, for her beloved Italy. I don’t know, I imagine that François her husband had something to answer for there. It was said that he had found a wax effigy of himself in her room, containing no less than three hundred pins, and had laughed delightedly. He was a cynical devil. Aunt Clo says that he used to lock up his wife in their dismal château in Provence and keep her on bread and water for days at a time. In any case he did not lock up Bianca, nor did Bianca seem to have inherited any of her mother’s aptitude for getting into scrapes. One could not easily detect in her the Italian strain, one only noticed that she was a little different from French women, with a different timbre of voice and an occasional mannerism evocative of something foreign, something lazy and sly and mysterious, and if she had inherited secret affinities with that warm romantic southern country of intrigue and superstition, she kept them hidden, together with all manner of other things, strange things, violent obsessions, curious tastes, dark obscure desires, and knowledge of a dangerous kind. She chose to appear at this time, I allude to the period covering the first years of Jane’s marriage to Philibert, as merely the supreme expression of the elegant world of Paris.

It is curious to watch the rise and fall of women in society. Women loom on the horizon; suddenly for no apparent reason. A gold mine, a rubber plantation, a motor-industry, suddenly looms into prominence. It takes the fancy, it is advertised, it becomes popular, people buy shares in it, the shares go higher and higher, the rush to buy becomes a scramble, and then perhaps a fraud is discovered, there is a collapse, and a large number of people find they have been expensively fooled. So it is in society. Women loom on the horizon; suddenly for no apparent reason they take the popular fancy. Comparatively plain women or women we have all known for years and have considered insignificant, become all at once conspicuous and important. Some one calls her, the plain woman, a beauty. Some one else repeats it. People become curious. They look at her with a new interest. A number of men who were before indifferent to her charms begin to pay her marked attention. The boom begins. Every one agrees that they have heretofore been mistaken. Her nose is not a snub nose. She is a beauty. It is whispered that so-and-so is _très emballé_. She is the success of the season. And after, when her day is over, she still retains something, once having been acclaimed a beauty she remains a beauty. Only the men who dubbed her nose Grecian look at it now with the same indifference that it inspired when they called it “snub.” They have been engaged in a little flurry in the social stock market. They do not admit having been fooled, but being inveterate gamblers they turn their attention elsewhere. The boom of the gold-mine is over, they go in for rubber. The men, i. e. the gamblers, are always the same in these affairs; it is the women who come and go.

Bianca was not one of these. She was no shooting star in the social heaven, she was a fixture, the little central shining constellation in a firmament of lesser planets. As a child she had been an institution. Strangers were taken to the Bois to look at the beautiful little girl, who, all in white, white fur coat and white gaiters, and followed by a white pom, walked there with her governess. She never sought the favour of Paris. She laid her will upon it and it submitted. As she grew older she made few women friends and tolerated no rivals. She was nice to old men and old ladies, people like my mother adored her, but most young women were afraid of her. Jane was an exception. Jane loved her. The two as I say used to go about together. The intimacy was shocking to me--I loathed Philibert for allowing it.

Jane had no suspicions. Her confidence in Philibert was such as to make us as a family quite nervous. What would she do, we asked ourselves, when she found out? Paris took little account of Jane. After the first flurry of excitement over her wedding, it lost sight of her. She disappeared behind Philibert. Curious how such a little man could hide from view a woman so much bigger than himself. It was a case of perspective. He stood in the foreground. To the more distant public she was invisible; to those who came nearer she appeared as nothing more interesting than a large fine piece of furniture. Philibert sometimes in moments of good humour alluded to her as his Byzantine Madonna.

I should defeat my own object in telling this story if I did not do Philibert justice. Yet how do him justice? If he were a centipede or a rare species of bird my task would be easier. But he lived on the earth in the guise of a human being, and he was not quite a human being. And it is difficult to be just to a brother such as Philibert. He always loathed the sight of me. I don’t blame him for that. I loathe the sight of myself. I am an ugly object. But Philibert found it amusing to hate me and to make me constantly aware of my deformity. My twisted frame seemed to produce in him a kind of itching frenzy, to tickle him to dreadful laughter, to irritate him to nervous cruelty. And I was unfortunately never able to grow a thick enough skin to protect me from him.

I suppose that I have always been jealous of Philibert. I loved life, but it pushed me aside. I wanted it, I wanted it in all its fulness, but it was Philibert who had it. And my incapacity to taste so many of its pleasures has only made me regard it with a closer, more wistful attention. I was like a ragamuffin in the street with his nose plastered against the pastry-cook’s window, a ragamuffin who dreamed that his pockets were full of gold, but who always found that the bright coins he jingled so lovingly in his fingers were not accepted over the counter. After repeated rebuffs, I gave up trying to get anything, but I could not take my eyes from the feast and so, even in my childhood, I resorted to the fiction of considering myself an invisible spectator of other people’s doings, and I helped along this little game by sitting as much as possible in dark corners or behind the kindly screen of some large piece of furniture such as the schoolroom piano. All that I asked of the world that so prodigiously attracted my interest was that it should not notice me, and thus leave me free to notice it, and I came at last to feel when some one out of kindness or cruelty dragged me out of my corner, a sense of outrage. So it was when Philibert, taking me by my collar, exposed me to kicks and to laughter. So it was years later when Jane, taking me by the hand, exposed me to the responsibilities of a friendship that demanded action. I used to dodge Philibert when I could. I would have avoided Jane’s confidence had I been able. Philibert’s tormenting in no way involved me. I could just let him kick and was when he finished as free as before to subside into my corner; with Jane it was different. Jane involved me in everything.

And now that I am obliged to think of my own personal relation to Jane, I have as I do so, a feeling of pain that is like the throbbing of some old hurt or the recurrence of an illness. Jane was magnificent and healthy and whole. She was half a head taller than I. I am cursed with a visualizing mind. As I set myself to the business of remembering her life, I see her constantly moving before my eyes, visibly acting out her drama, and I see myself, a wizened little man looking up at her from a distance. I have an acute sense of an opportunity lost for ever, of precious time wasted. For years I refused to sympathize with her as her friend. For years I would not talk to her because I was afraid she would complain to me of my family. How little I knew her!

Slowly she imposed herself. Like a woman coming towards me in a fog, I saw her grow more clear and more definite, until at last I recognized her for what she was.

Was I merely in love with her? Was it that? Was that all? If so she never suspected it. If so I did not recognize the feeling. It is, of course, the accusation my brother brought against me. He spoke of my criminal passion for his wife. It is very curious. The cleverest men are sometimes very obtuse. Philibert’s intelligence was of the kind that made it impossible for him to understand simple things.

In love with Jane? I find that I have no idea what the phrase means and cannot apply it. It is as if I were trying to fit a little paper pattern to a cloud floating off there in the heaven. My tenderness for Jane does remind me a little of a cloud. It has changed so often in shape and hue. At times it has seemed to me a little white floating thing of celestial brightness, at others it has enveloped me in darkness and always it has been intangible, vague, unlinked to the earth.

And yet, even to me, she did seem at first very queer. It seemed to me that she was really too different to be innocent of all desire to make trouble. She often annoyed me by remaining so silent when any one else would have burst out with a flood of protest, and by going pale as death when a moderate flush ought to have expressed a sufficient sense of disturbance. The excessive emotional restraint evidenced by those sudden mute pallors of hers used to worry me with their exaggeration. I understood how this sort of thing, displeased my mother. I can remember moments when I expected to see her bound across the room and go crushing through the mirror, so tense was her physical stillness. Claire used to look at her then with lifted eyebrows and turn away with a nervous shrug of impatient disdain. I felt with Claire. I understood this sort of thing little better than she did. We were accustomed to people whose gestures were used to enhance the fine finished meaning of spoken phrases, not to dumb creatures whose eyes and quivering nostrils and long strong contracted fingers betrayed them in drawing rooms. I, caught up in the fine web of my family’s prejudices, had found myself from the midst of those delicate meshes seeing her as they saw her, as some gorgeous dangerous animal who was tearing the very fabric of their system to pieces with its many gyrations. As I say, I doubted her innocence. I suppose like every one else in the family I was affected by the glare Mrs. Carpenter’s obvious ambition threw over her. It didn’t seem to me possible that Jane had married Philibert simply and solely because he fascinated her. Not that I didn’t know Philibert to be capable of fascinating any one he wanted to, but because such fascinations had never seemed to me to contain in themselves any basis for marriage. The truth involved too great a stretch for my imagination. I had to find it out gradually. It necessitated too, the admission on my part that for Jane the name of Joigny counted for absolutely nothing. I couldn’t be supposed to know that Jane didn’t care a straw about marrying our family, when her mother so obviously laid great store by her doing so.

But I started to explain Philibert, and suddenly it comes to me; I believe that at the bottom of everything he did was the controlling impulse of his hatred of life. Undeniably he despised humanity. It exasperated him to tears. Its stupidity put him in a nervous frenzy. He was animated by a kind of rage of mockery. Everything that humanity cherished was to him anathema. He had been born with a distaste for all that men as a rule called goodness, and was nervously impelled towards that which they called evil. And yet the evil he courted didn’t do him any harm. I mean that it didn’t wear him out or spoil his digestion or stupefy his intelligence. On the contrary it agreed with him. He had begun to taste of life with the palate of a worn out old man. The good bread and butter and milk of the sweetness of life was repulsive to him and disagreed with him. He could live to be a hundred on a moral diet that would have killed in a week a child of nature. Sophistication can go no further. His equipment was complete, and he had, I suppose, no choice. His nature was imposed on him at birth. His punishment was that he lived alone in a world that bored him to extinction.

Seriously, he appears to me now, as I think of him, as a man living under a curse. I believe him to have been haunted by a sense of unreality. To get in contact with something and feel it up against him, that was one of the objects that obscurely impelled him. His extravagances of conduct were efforts to arrive at the primitive sensation of being alive. He did not know this. He only knew that he hated everything sooner or later. He was conscious merely of an irritating desire for sensation and amusement. His fear was that he would run through all pleasure before he died and find nothing left for him to do. It may have occurred to him at times that the world minus human interest did not provide endless sources of amusement. The things one could do to distract oneself were not after all so very many. Even vice has alas, its limitations, and it was not as if he were really in himself vicious. He had an absolute incapacity for forming habits good or bad. Could he have saddled himself with one or two the problem would have been simpler. Could he have become a drunkard how many hours would have been accounted for! If women had only had an indisputable power over him, what a relief to let himself go. But no. He was the victim of no malady and no craving. Drink as he might, his head remained excruciatingly clear, debauch himself as much as he would, he remained master of his passions, and day after day, year after year, he was obliged to plan what he would do with himself.

He found in the world only one kindred spirit. Bianca was the one creature on earth who was a match for him. She was more, and he knew it; she was in his own line his superior. Many people have been astonished at Philibert’s _liaison_ with Bianca. They have considered the intimacy of these two people strange. I believe that Philibert’s feeling for Bianca was as simple as the feeling of a good man for a good woman, and as inevitable as if he and she were the only two white people in a world of black men. I believe that Philibert turned to Bianca in despair and clung to her out of loneliness. He and she were alone on the earth, as alone as if they had been gods condemned to live among men. She was his mate, moulded in the marvellous infernal mould that suited him. _Voilà tout._

But she was a more refined instrument than he was. She filtered experience through a finer sieve. She had a steadier hand. Hers was the great advantage of being able to wait for her amusement and her effects. She was economical of her material. Philibert was afraid of running through the whole of experience and exhausting too soon the resources of life. Bianca was not afraid of anything, not even of being bored. She meted out pleasure with deliberation. She calculated her capital with fine precision, she measured the future with a centimetre rule, and poured out sensation into a spoon, sipping it slowly.

Philibert was a spendthrift. Bianca was as close as a peasant woman. And on the whole Philibert was honest. He did not try to deceive the world. He was too impatient and despised it too much. When he fooled it he did so openly and if people found him out he laughed. But Bianca was deep as a well and as secretive as death. What Philibert was so he appeared, but no one knew what Bianca was.

During the summer that Jane spent alone at Joigny with her child, Philibert and Bianca saw a great deal of each other. Bianca had musical evenings that summer, in her garden, and little midnight suppers that were quite another variety of gathering. Philibert never drank too much at these suppers, neither did Bianca; as much cannot be said of some of the others, if Philibert’s own account of these graceful orgies was true. It was at one of them that poor Fan Ivanoff’s husband threw a glass of champagne in her face, cutting her cheek. Neither Fan nor her wretched Russian were asked again. Bianca did not like that sort of thing.

Jane has told me that she did not go to America that summer because she hoped that Philibert would come to her at Joigny. She had found it impossible after the first shock of his revelations to believe that they were true. She told herself that he had been carried away by one of his fine frenzies of talk and had said things he had not meant. It was incredible to her that he should really mean that he cared nothing for her. He had, to her mind, given her during those years of marriage too many proofs to the contrary. Thinking it over alone she came to the conclusion that there was some mystery here that only time would make clear to her, and she therefore determined to wait. For a month, for two months, for three, she believed he would come and if not explain, at least put things on some decent footing, but he did not come for the simple reason that Bianca wouldn’t let him.

One has only to stop a moment and remember what he had at stake to realize the extent of Bianca’s power over him. He was entirely dependent on Jane for money. There was no settlement of any kind and he had none of his own. With her enormous income pouring through his hands, he had not a penny to show if she left him, and when people accused him later, as some did, of having put aside a portion of that revenue for himself they were wrong. His code of ethics, morals, what you will, his idea anyway, of what was permitted and what was not, allowed him to spend all her income and even run into debt; but not keep any of it for the future. It did not shock him in the least to spend Jane’s dollars on his various mistresses but it would have disgusted him to find any of these coins sticking to his palms. As long as he poured them out he was satisfied with himself; had he hoarded it he would have been ashamed.

In any case he knew the risk he ran, for he understood Jane, and knew that the fear of scandal would not keep her if she once decided to break with him. Nor could he have diminished the magnitude of the catastrophe that this would mean. His sensational reign had only begun, but it had already become vital to his happiness--I use the word happiness, for lack of another. He had done great things, but nothing as yet to compare with what he intended to do. The fame of his entertainments had already reached the different capitals of Europe, he had seen to that, but this was mere advertisement, preparatory work necessary to the realization of his ultimate purpose. He was in the position of a company promoter who had sent out his circulars and gathered in a certain amount of capital, but had not yet founded his business, and was still far from holding the monopoly he aimed at. He was certain of success but he must have time. If his plans miscarried now he would be his own swindler.

Jane, he realized perfectly, felt little interest in his schemes. It was one of the grudges he had against her. Her attitude from the first had been galling in its simplicity. When on the eve of their marriage he had proposed to her building a house, she had suggested that perhaps one of the beautiful old ones already existing in Paris might do, but on his insisting that none could compare with the image he had in his mind, she had given in with a sweetness and promptness that had taken his breath away. It is characteristic of him, in this connection, that though he wanted his own way and intended to get it, his pleasure in doing so would have been very much greater had she made it more difficult. Her pliability seemed to him stupid and when she merely said, looking over the plans he proudly spread out before her, some weeks later, “It’s dreadfully big, but if you like it I shall,” he came near to gnashing his teeth. It was equally galling to him neither to impress her nor to anger her, but he was obliged to contain himself, for after all, as he put it to Claire, he couldn’t go and tear the thing up just to spite himself. She would calmly have put the bits in the waste-paper basket.

When it came to arranging the house she had said--“I want one room at the top for my own. No one is to go there. I shall arrange it myself,” and the rest she left to him. I believe he never entered that room and never knew what she had done to it. If he thought about it at all, he doubtless thought she had arranged it as a chapel. He probably imagined an altar and candles and photographs of the dead. Jane never told him about it. Some obscure instinct of mistrust must have been at the bottom of her shyness. She had furnished it quite simply like a room in the Grey House in St. Mary’s Plains. Her Aunt Patty had sent her a rocking chair, an old mahogany dresser, the window curtains from her old room, and some of her special belongings that she had left behind when she came away. It was the strangest room at the top of that mansion. I remember well the day Jane took me to it. She had come in from some function and was looking more worldly than usual. I remember gazing beyond her outstretched silken arm with its jade bracelets into what seemed to me the most pathetic of sanctuaries. The window curtains were of faded cretonne. The worn rocking chair had a knitted antimacassar. Two battered rag dolls sat on an old spindle-legged dresser against the wall. A spirit dwelt there that I did not know.

But I am wandering away from my subject. What I started to say was that Philibert’s life hung by the thread of Jane’s belief in him and he knew it. If he thought that thread was an iron cable then that fatuous belief alone might explain his putting such a strain upon it, but I don’t believe it was so. However far he thought he could try Jane, there was no sense in doing so, and he wouldn’t have done so had he followed the dictates of his own wisdom. It would have been so easy to have gone for a week to Joigny. Two days would have sufficed. A three hours’ journey in the train, two days away from Bianca, and Jane would have been reassured and his own future secure. So he would have reasoned it out had he been left alone, but Bianca did not leave him alone.

Her motive was quite simply to make mischief. She wanted Jane to suffer. She loved Philibert but she wanted him to suffer as well. There was nothing more in it than that. The most subtle people have sometimes the simplest purposes. Bianca’s subtlety often consisted in doing very ordinary things in a way that made them appear extraordinary. Her cleverness in this instance lay in the fact that Philibert did not suspect her motive. It is even doubtful whether he knew that it was she who prevented his going. Certainly she never did anything so stupid as to tell him not to go. It was rather the other way round. If they discussed it at all it was Bianca who urged upon him the advisability of his doing his duty as a husband. I can imagine her lying back on her divan with her lovely little spindly arms over her head and saying with a yawn, that really he was too negligent of his wife. His wife adored him. She was ready to fall into his arms. She was probably very sulky now, but once he appeared she would welcome him with all the ardour she was saving up during her _villégiature_. I can see Bianca looking at Philibert through half-closed eyes, while she touched up for him a portrait of Jane calculated to make him shudder.

Bianca herself was going yachting in the Mediterranean. She wanted to be hot, to soak in enough sunlight to keep her warm for next winter. They were to laze about the Grecian islands. G---- the historian was to be one of the party. While she was giving her body a prolonged Turkish Bath and taking a course in Greek history, he would be free to bring in the cows with Jane. No, he couldn’t come with her, it would be too compromising for him. American women began divorce proceedings on the least provocation.

And Philibert, of course, did go on that yacht to the Grecian isles, but to judge from his humour when he returned, he did not get out of the trip what he had expected. Bianca having lured him out there seemed to forget that he had come at her invitation. She left the party at the first opportunity and went off inland on a donkey, and didn’t come back, merely sent a message for her maid and her boxes to meet her at Athens.

Nor did Philibert find Jane waiting for him in Paris as he had expected, nor any message from her. It was the butler who informed him that Madame had gone to Biarritz with the Prince and Princess Ivanoff, and it was to Biarritz that Philibert was obliged to go to fetch her home.

XI

Things had been going very badly with the Ivanoffs. Their combined resources left them poorer than either had been before. Ivanoff’s resources consisted in debts, but debts that he never was obliged to pay, because he couldn’t. His creditors, those I mean who were in the business of money-lending, became more hopeful when he married and approached Fan without delay believing of course, that being an American she was rich. Poor Fan with her few meagre thousands a year meted them out bravely enough at first, paying here and there, the minimum that was nevertheless her maximum. Ivanoff had a small rather shabby flat on the Isle St. Louis, with one big room. It could be said of it that the place had atmosphere and would attract their friends if they made the most of its Bohemian charm. So they decided to live there, thinking thus to keep down their expenses. But Fan needed many things that had been unnecessary to the existence of Ivanoff. She required cleanliness, a bathroom with a hot-water installation, cupboards to hold her clothes, a lace coverlet for her bed, and enough wood and coal to keep the place warm. Ivanoff had never realized the damp and cold; when he was cold he drank vodka or brandy. He had not been over fond of washing; he took his baths at the club or in a public bath house. Fan’s maid was a complication. There was no proper room for her. She was constantly grumbling about Fan’s discomfort and served her little mistress with grim disapproval, making continual scenes with the Prince for the way he failed to look after the Princess, and going out herself on the sly to buy things for the house that she felt were wanted. The one department in the _ménage_ that ran well was the kitchen. Ivanoff had a gift for cooking. He could train any youngster and turn him in three months into an excellent cook. When they gave parties he would go into the kitchen, put on an apron, roll up his sleeves and cook the dinner. He did his own marketing, going out with a basket on his arm. One ate better at his table than anywhere else in Paris. He used to make a bit now and then by passing one of his cooks on to a friend. He bought his wines in out of the way corners of France, and got them cheap, and these too, he sometimes sold at a profit. Nevertheless their expenses during the first year of their marriage were more than double their income. They had many friends; a great number of Russians, French, Italians, and Spanish and a few Americans came to their suppers, that were served in the big living room. People ate reclining or squatting on cushions with little tables before them. When the tables were carried out, some as yet undiscovered artist from a distant country turned up with a violin under his arm, or Ivanoff himself with his guitar on his knees would sing the folksongs of his country, with the long window open to the moonlit river and the dimly-looming towers of Notre Dame. All this was very gay and pleasant, but they could not keep it up unless they did something to make money. For a year Fan tried to find a respectable employment for her husband, but she was met everywhere with polite, but to her, mystifying refusals. Even the antique dealers refused to employ him to buy for them. Yes, they admitted, he had an exceptional “flair,” but he had no idea of money, and if he fell in love with a piece was as likely as not, in a burst of enthusiasm, to pay the owner more than he asked. And Ivanoff himself said that he had no capacity for steady work of any kind. She would send him to interview some financier or banker; he would go and talk charmingly about all manner of things save the business in hand, and then say “You know the Princess my wife wants you to do something for me. I have come to please her, but of course you and I understand that it is no use. It wouldn’t last a month, and I might make some mistake that would anger you.” And he would come away happily, to report to Fan that there was nothing he could do in that line. She was obliged to admit him to be incorrigible. The only thing he could do to make money was play cards. He played Bridge superlatively well. If he played enough he could count on making a hundred thousand francs a year.

I believe, because Jane has insisted that it was so, that Fan was for a long time unaware of the fact that Ivanoff made a living at cards, and I know that when she discovered that his stories about rents from properties in Russia were fairy tales and that the sums he turned over to her were really his winnings at little green baize tables, that she took it very hard for a time, and made him stop playing, but how could they then pay their bills? For six months she held out and he obediently stayed away from his clubs, spent his time wandering along the quays, twanging his guitar on his sofa, and cooking the dinner, while Fan’s little wizened face grew sharper and her laugh shriller and her cough more troublesome.

The inevitable happened. She caught cold. There was no coal to heat the flat. The maid, Margot, flew at Ivanoff, in a paroxysm. Ivanoff wept and tore his hair, fell at the foot of Fan’s bed, implored her forgiveness and rushed off to the Club. One is obliged to accept the inevitable. Fan asked no questions after that. I thought that I detected a furtive look in her eyes and a note of high bravado in her gaiety, when she staggered out of bed to go about again amusing herself. I imagined that she was ashamed. I may be wrong. In any case though every one knew their circumstances, she remained enormously popular.

The strange thing was that Ivanoff could always find people to play with him. The certain knowledge that they stood to lose heavily, irresistibly attracted men to his table, rich men, of course, he only played with rich men. He couldn’t afford Bridge as a pastime. And I know for certain that he derived from it no amusement. If his victims approached that square of green baize with pleasurable shivers of excitement, it was not so with him. Winning money at cards was no more interesting to him than is the breaking of stones to an Italian labourer. He played with what seemed to most people an exaggerated pretence of boredom, but his boredom was no pretence. Ivanoff never pretended in his life. He was a child of nature, a great dark abysmal child of the Slavic race. People liked him, they couldn’t help it. He was considered rather mad and utterly undependable. He had a way of disappearing mysteriously, and of reappearing again suddenly, and he never attempted to account for these absences. “Where have you been this time Ivanoff,” some one at the club would ask him, and he would smile his wide mongolian smile that narrowed his eyes to slits making him look like a chinaman, and then a worried wistful look would come over his sallow face and he would smooth carefully his heavy black hair--“I don’t know,” he would say, “I really can’t remember,” and somehow one believed him. He drank heavily, and when he was drunk he would talk about God, and the soul of the Russian people that was a deep pure soul besotted with despair, and would say that God in His wisdom must put an end to human misery very soon. He had an extraordinary gift for languages. Indeed he had many gifts and no capacity and no ambition. It never seemed to occur to him that he ought to provide for his wife, or look after her. For the most part, between his disappearances he followed her about like a great tame bear. He had an immense respect for her. “What a head she has,” he would say. “What a head for figures, and what a will. She can make me do anything, anything, except the things for which I am incurably incapacitated. I am like wax in her hands.”

Poor Fan! If he had had a little more respect for himself and a little less for her, it would have been easier for her. He drank more and more heavily as time went on. Night after night he would come home to her drunk and lie in a stupor wherever he happened to fall. Again and again he would beg her forgiveness, throw himself at her feet, kissing them and weeping like a heart-broken child. And because she found him beautiful, and because she believed he loved her, she did, over and over again forgive him, but she was worried half out of her mind. It began to dawn on her that his card-playing wasn’t enough; that he borrowed money of everybody. She foresaw that the day would soon dawn when every one of his men friends was a creditor. It didn’t occur to her at this time that he borrowed money from women as well. Nor did it occur to her as a possible solution to cut down her expenses by changing her mode of life. She and Ivanoff, and a lot of their friends for that matter, lived on the principle that, as Montesquieu said, it was bad enough not to have money, but, if in addition one had to deprive oneself of the things one wanted, then life would be intolerable. She had married Ivanoff to be a princess and to have a good time. She was still pleased with being a princess and more determined than ever to enjoy herself. Pleasure, noisy, distracting absorbing pleasure was becoming more and more necessary to her. As her troubles thickened, her craving for excitement grew. The more she was worried the more she needed to laugh. Her life became a staccato tune of laughter and hurting throbs and petulant crescendoes of gaiety. It was a tinkling dance with a drumming accompaniment of worry, the rhythm of it moving faster and faster as her problem deepened.

And people as I say liked her. Even Claire continued to see much of her. She was considered original and very plucky. Her parties were amusing, and she herself could be trusted to make any dinner a success. Her very shrill yell of laughter came to have a definite social value. She talked with a hard gay abandon that affected people like a spray of hot salt water. Fagged and blasé spirits turned to her for refreshment. She would enter a drawing-room on the run, and call out some extravagant yet neat phrase, and every one would become perky and animated. Always she had had some amusing and extraordinary adventure five minutes before her arrival. Her taxi had dumped her into the street, or a man had tried to abduct her or she had found a bill of a thousand francs lying on the doorstep. One never questioned her veracity. Nobody cared whether these things really happened or whether she made them up for the general amusement. It was all the more to her credit if she took the trouble to invent them. And enough things did happen to her, heaven knows, dreadful things. She was always in trouble. Her health was execrable. People mentioned phthisis. She had a way of fainting in the street and waking up in strange houses from which she had miraculous escapes. Decorated by her amusing gift of description, made entertaining by her contagious laughter, her miseries and her unfortunate adventures came to be an endless source of amusement in society. Her misfortune was her social capital; she turned it all to account.

Jane alone was not amused. Jane alone took Fan’s troubles seriously as if they had been her own, and watched her with concern and tried to reason with her. But Fan didn’t want any one to reason with her and was annoyed by Jane’s anxiety. At bottom I believe, during this period of their existence, that Jane bored her. She loved her, of course, in a way, because of their childhood, she knew that she could count on her in any crisis, but she preferred talking to Philibert. When she lunched in Jane’s house, she and Philibert would sit together after lunch and scream with laughter, and then, when she was about to leave, her little face would suddenly turn grey with fatigue, and she would say to Jane’s anxious enquiry--“Yes, my dear, I’m as sick as a dog. I haven’t slept for a month. I’m living on _piqûres_,” and then, tearing herself out of Jane’s embrace she would go away coughing, coughing terribly all the way down the stairs. Jane gave her a good many clothes. Fan told me so herself. “My dear,” she said, “I’m not going with Jane any more to her dressmaker’s. She insists on my taking too many things, and if I don’t she’s hurt. I escaped from Chéruit’s this morning with nothing more than a chinchilla coat. What do you think of that? I shall send it back when it comes, and there’ll be a scene.” And she did send it back, and there was I suppose, what she would call a scene. Jane spoke of it too, for she had overheard. She said--“Of course I’d rather give Fan blankets and coals, but as I can’t do anything sensible for her, why shouldn’t she let me do something foolish?”

I will say for Fan that she did not sponge, neither on Jane nor on any one else. She left that part of it to Ivanoff. And again Jane insisted that she didn’t know about Ivanoff. In any case it was Ivanoff who gave Jane her opportunity, as she believed, to help Fan. He came to see her one afternoon in a high state of excitement, made her swear she would never tell Fan a word of what had passed between them, and then asked her for fifty thousand francs. He said that they would be turned out into the street if he couldn’t get the money in two days, and that every stick of their furniture would be sold. It was unnecessary for him to explain to Jane why Fan should not be told. Jane knew, at least she thought she knew, that Fan would refuse the money. So she gave Ivanoff a cheque payable to herself and endorsed it and felt happy to have been able to help them. Ivanoff had pointed out that it would be best for her not to make out a cheque in his name. This was the thin end of the wedge.

Ivanoff having been well received, came back six months later and again after that. He had from Jane all told about two hundred thousand francs during a period of two or three years, not a large sum to Jane certainly. She easily enough hid the payments from Philibert by paying the amounts out of her personal account for clothes, travelling, flowers, trinkets, and so on. Occasionally she would countermand an order for a fur coat and feel that she was making a personal sacrifice for Fan, and this added a very real element of joy to her pleasure. And there was no doubt in her mind that this money did go to help Fan. Ivanoff always had some tale of Fan’s illnesses, her doctors’ bills, her need to go to some watering place for a cure, her last unfortunate venture in the stock market. Nevertheless Jane was worried. She was worried, God help her, because she was deceiving Philibert. The subject was heavy on her mind. At times she felt she must tell Philibert all about it, but Philibert did not like Ivanoff. She was afraid to tell him for fear he should put a stop to her doing anything more in that quarter. Philibert tolerated Fan because she was amusing and helped to occupy Jane, but he would not tolerate Ivanoff, and refused to have the Russian in his house. He was unaware of the latter’s quarterly afternoon visits. This, too, Jane had been obliged to keep from him. If she told Philibert that Ivanoff had been to call and had been received, she would have to explain why. Philibert seldom showed any interest in the people she received on her day in the afternoon, but he did occasionally ask her who had been there, and suggest that one or another was really too stupid or too ugly to be welcomed under his roof. He did not wish his house to be invaded by touring Americans or by the halt, the lame and the blind, so he exercised a sort of censorship over his wife’s calling list. Ivanoff was one of the people who to Philibert were beyond the pale. Up to the night of Bianca’s supper party he had forced himself to greet the big Russian with civility when he met him in other people’s houses, but after the beastly exhibition the latter had made of himself there, he had let it be known that he did not wish to find himself again anywhere in the same room with him.

It was therefore extremely unpleasant to Philibert to learn from his butler that Jane had gone to Biarritz with the Ivanoffs. Nothing, indeed, that Jane could have done could have been so disagreeable to him. Had she planned it on purpose as a revenge, she could not have calculated better, and he believed she had done so. He had come to his senses. He had perceived during the train journey north that he had been very foolish to take such risks. It occurred to him that he had not heard from Jane for two months, and that he did not know where she was. She might have gone to America, she might be there with the intention of not coming back. She was capable of anything. The news he received on arrival was a relief that left him free to enjoy his exasperation. He was not in a desperate fix after all, it was Jane who was in a fix. She had at last given him a definite cause of complaint and had incurred his displeasure in a way that made it easy for him to act against her. If this were her way of taking a line of her own and paying him back, she had played beautifully into his hands. He took the train for Biarritz, smiling and revolving pleasantly in his heart the things he would say.

But Jane had had no ulterior motive in what she had done. She had come back to Paris at the end of September and had found Fan lying exhausted by haemorrhage in an untidy bed with a bowl of blood beside her, and Ivanoff on the floor, his head in his hands, sobbing, while Margot stormed at him for his uselessness. Jane had simply picked Fan up in her arms, and had carried her away, and Ivanoff like an unhappy dog had followed, his tail between his legs. The haemorrhage had thoroughly frightened him. It was a fortnight later that Philibert, one brilliant afternoon announced himself at the Palace Hotel Biarritz. Fan was better and Ivanoff had recovered from his terror. Philibert found the two women in an upstairs sitting-room overlooking the sea. Fan was on a couch, her little wizened face screwed into a smile of bravado under her lace bonnet, and a cigarette between her rouged lips. Jane looked the more ill of the two. Her usual glowing pallor had turned to the whitish-grey of ashes, there were purple circles under her eyes. She was looking out of the window, her hands clasped behind her head, and when Philibert entered she wheeled at the sound of his voice, and then stood silently trembling.

Fan cried out at him, gaily impertinent. “Hullo, Fifi, you didn’t come too soon, did you?”

He didn’t answer her. “Come with me,” he said to Jane briefly, and she followed him out of the room. He had passed Ivanoff below in the bar. The sight had added nothing pleasant to his humour.

What he said to her was what he had intended to say. Her wasted face made no impression in her favour, on the contrary. He read in her agitation signs of guilt and seemed to have forgotten that he had abandoned her during six months on the pretext that she loved him too much.

As for Jane, she listened to him in a silence that she tried to make natural and easy.

Telling me about it afterwards she said, “I had determined this time to give him no opportunity of laughing at me. I made scarcely a movement. Though I was trembling, I managed to sit down in a comfortable chair and cross my legs and lean back, as if he had come to tell me something pleasant.”

He expressed without preamble his displeasure at finding her in the company of the Ivanoffs. He was surprised to find that she cared for such people. She knew, that he loathed Ivanoff and considered him an unfit companion for any respectable woman. He saw no reason why his wife should make his name a by-word in the glaring publicity of such a place as Biarritz. Here she was in the centre of a dissolute set of cosmopolitan adventurers, behaving like a common woman of light character, or at least giving the impression to the world of so behaving. He presumed that the Ivanoffs were her guests and were costing her a pretty penny. That was a side issue. The Russian was a dissolute ruffian who lived not alone on his winning at cards but on women. He was a man kept by women. As for Ivanoff’s wife, she knew what her husband was up to and profitted by his earnings. Jane, with white lips interrupted him here.

“I don’t believe you,” she said quietly. And then more sharply, “You forget that Fan is my best friend.”

He sneered. “I do not forget. I am merely unable to congratulate you on your taste. As for Ivanoff’s habits I can give you precise details. There is a woman in this hotel--” Something in Jane’s face stopped him. She did not speak at once, but leaning slightly forward, one arm on the table before her, looked at him calmly and smiled. She had done a good deal of thinking during those lonely months at Joigny. Alone and unobserved she had passed through her crisis. She was no longer the same person. Day after day, tramping the country, she had passed in review the years of her marriage and had scrutinized their every content, discovering slowly their meaning. She had learned a great many things. She was beginning to understand more than she had ever dreamed existed, of complication and danger in her surroundings, and she had determined if Philibert came back to her to put up a fight for her life, she meant her life with him: for the one thing she had not yet learned was to despise him. She still blamed herself for not having made him love her. She still cared for him. But she had learned a great deal, and among other things she had found out that she was alone. There was no one for her to turn to. His family, with one possible exception, myself, she realized now disliked her.

So she met him calmly. His attack had actually been a relief to her. Her agitation had been due just simply to the marvellous fact of his having come back to her, and she read in his annoyance a proof of his not being after all as indifferent to herself as he tried to make her believe. She voiced this.

“I was not aware,” she said quietly, “that you in the least cared what I did.” Her words and her tone startled him. He looked at her quickly. It was clear to him that she was older and wiser and would be more difficult to deal with than he had supposed. A gleam shot out at her from his eyes. It met an answering gleam. In silence their wills clashed. They were both aware that a struggle had begun. It was she who, after a moment, continued--

“I do not believe what you say about Fan and Ivanoff. I know that your worst accusation is untrue. Fan is incapable of accepting such money.” She paused as if to calculate her effect and added deliberately. “As for Ivanoff, if he lives on women then I am one of them. I have lent him money myself.”

He had turned away from her, but at this he whirled round like a top, his face contorted.

“What? What do you say? You? You have given him--?”

“Yes, I have given him money on several occasions.”

Her immobility had its effect. He hung over her speechless, his lips twitching, and she continued to look at him. At last she spoke.

“What do you think I gave him money for, Philibert?”

He saw instantly his danger. Her tone conveyed it to him. If he voiced a suspicion of anything so horrible he destroyed himself for ever in her eyes. His brain worked quickly enough to save him. Marvellously and lucidly he knew she would never forgive him for suspecting her, and suddenly he knew that she could not be accused. Her virtue that had so bored him was unassailable and her pride frightened him. Whether he liked it or not there it was before him, and as if he couldn’t bear the sight of it he whirled away from her and stalked to the window, muttering peevishly something about his not knowing why or what she had been up to. But she didn’t let him off. Her voice followed him across the room.

“I gave Ivanoff money for Fan. You understand that, don’t you, Philibert. You don’t suggest for a moment anything else, do you?”

He remained with his back to her, and she remained where she was, waiting, watching his nervous hands that twisted his coat-tails, and his foot kicking the window-sill, watching her image of him shrinking, wavering, changing. At last she rose. She was afraid now, afraid of despising him, afraid to watch him any longer. She moved to the door and from her further distance spoke again.

“I have given Ivanoff in all two hundred and fifty thousand francs. If you have anything to say about my doing so, please speak now. I am waiting.”

And he, at last, found the words with which to meet her.

“I don’t believe Fan ever got a penny of it.”

At that she faltered a moment, but only a moment. Her tone when she spoke was smooth and light.

“Well, if she didn’t it’s lost.” She could take it as high as that. She gave a little shrug, just the slightest shrug. It may be that she really did strike him as almost coming up to his own standard at that moment. In any case he chose the instant for his own recovery. He had seemed not to know what to do. He had made a very painful impression. His indecision had humiliated her more than his violence. She felt ashamed for him now, and all the pent-up passion in her surged uncomfortably, hurtingly, against the shock her opinion of him had received, sending hot waves of blood pounding through her veins, that gave her a feeling of sickness. He divined something of this. It was time that he recovered himself, and his recovery was beautiful. It shows him, I maintain, an artist. He went up to her deliberately and took her hand, and looking into her eyes said--“You are astounding,” then watching his effect he added, “You are superb. I do not understand, but I admire.” And then deliberately with consummate gallantry he kissed her hand.

And poor Jane was pleased. On top of all her deep misery she was conscious of a little silvery ripple of pleasure. Though it would never be the same with her again she thought that she had won a battle, and made an impression, and with a kind of anguish of renunciation she accepted his offering. She knew now that he would never give her what she wanted, but she believed that he was prepared at last to give her something, and she was bound to allow him to do so.

They left Biarritz the next day, having agreed between them on a number of things. Jane was to inform the Ivanoffs that their rooms were retained for a fortnight longer. Philibert promised that he would never allow Ivanoff to know that he knew Jane had given him money. Jane in return agreed not to repeat the experiment and to have no further dealings with Ivanoff of any kind. She refused, however, to give up seeing Fan as she had always done.

XII

One day toward the middle of the winter of that year, Claire said to me; “What has happened to Philibert? He acts as if he were in love with his wife.” It was true. We had all noticed it. I mean Claire and my mother and myself, but gradually we came to notice something else as well, namely that Philibert’s increased attentions did not seem to be making Jane happy. She was strangely preoccupied and for her, strangely languid. Her old buoyancy was gone, and with it the impression she had so often conveyed of an over-powering awkward energy. _Maman_ need never fear now that Jane would fall on her and crush her. Claire need not worry about being pushed into corners. When Jane did join our family parties, and she came much less frequently than in the early days, she was almost always so absent-minded as to seem scarcely to realize where she was. She would come in with Philibert and the child Geneviève, kiss my mother gently on the forehead and then sink into a chair and forget us. We might now have said anything preposterous that came into our heads. She would not have noticed us. She did not listen to our talk, and when we addressed her directly would give a little start and say--“_Je vous demande pardon, je n’ai pas compris._” Sometimes I caught Philibert watching her as if he too were mystified and troubled. He would drag her into the conversation. “_Mais, mon amie, écoutes donc, quand on vous parle_,” he would exclaim in affectionate remonstrance, and she would flush a little and make a very obvious effort to pay attention. My mother felt there was something wrong. It may have seemed to her that she was herself responsible. She may have felt a certain contrition about Jane, or she may merely have found it intolerable that any one should derive from her drawing room circle so little apparent interest. In any case she made on her part an effort and talked to Jane much more, and in a different more intimate way than she had ever done before. And, of course, when actually talking directly to _Maman_ Jane was perfectly attentive and perfectly courteously sweet-tempered. But when my mother turned her head toward some one else, Jane, as if released from the end of some invisible string that had held her erect in her chair, would slip back and lean her cheek on her hand, and the light in her eyes would be veiled by that invisible glaze that means an inward gazing. Such are the eyes of the blind. One could at such moment have waved one’s fingers an inch from Jane’s face, and she would not have blinked, at least that was my impression.

And she was incredibly thin. Many people thought this becoming to her, but to me it was painful. I had no wish to find Jane beautiful if I felt that she was going to die, and there were days when I did feel she was, as one says, going into a decline. She had been so harmoniously big that one would never have supposed she carried much superfluous flesh, until one saw it wasting away and found her still alive, and not a hideous skeleton. Her marvellous hands and feet were now, I suppose, even more marvellous, but to me their beautiful exposed structure of lovely bones was a source of pain. Her wrists and ankles were so slim that one felt if she made a wrong movement they would snap, and her rich lustrous clothes seemed to find round her waist and bust nothing to cling to. Only her broad shoulders and narrow hips seemed to support them. One could not tell where her waist was. Sometimes under the silken fabric of her skirt one saw the shape of a sharp knee bone. Her face seemed to have grown much smaller. The cheeks hollowed in under prominent cheek-bones, and her small green eyes were sunk into her head--that was more than ever like some carved antique coin and had taken on a quite terrifying beauty; I mean that the charm of her ugliness had received its special ordained stamp, the mark that the god or imp who made it had meant it to have. She reddened her lips a little now; otherwise her face was untouched by powder or rouge. The skin was of the palest ivory colour, a close smooth dull surface, without a blemish, soft and pure and dead. There was about the texture of her skin something curious. It made one dream of a contact so cold that if a butterfly brushed against it the little living thing would fall lifeless to the ground.

And a new charm disengaged itself from her person. She seemed possessed of a hitherto-unused and undiscovered magnetism, and she dwelt with it silently, wrapped in a kind of gentle gloom that she tried now and then to throw off as one throws off a wet clinging garment. I do not want to give the impression that she was moody, for that would be untrue. She was, on the contrary, of an uncanny equanimity, and when she smiled her smile crept slowly and softly over her face and as softly faded away. There was no jerk of nerves about it. Nervous was the last word one could apply to her. She was superlatively quiet, unnaturally calm, and yet at times she looked at me like a haunted woman, a woman haunted not by a ghost but by an idea, perhaps by some profoundly disturbing knowledge.

We were increasingly troubled. We wondered if at last she had found out things about Philibert, particularly about Philibert and Bianca, and somehow the fact that we knew he was devoting himself more to Jane and less to Bianca did not console us. What indeed was it but just the most disturbing thing of all that Philibert’s new devotion to Jane produced in her no flush of responsive joy? My mother was very worried indeed, and we were affected by her anxiety. Even Claire began to watch Jane with a questioning puzzled attention. Often I found Claire’s dark eyes travelling from Jane to Philibert, from Philibert to my mother, from my mother back to Jane. And simultaneously my mother’s eyes moved from one to the other, and so did Philibert’s and so did mine. We were all looking from one to the other, watching, referring, puzzling, comparing. Jane alone looked at no one.

I should have felt this to be humorous had it not humiliated and annoyed. It seemed to me that we were slightly ridiculous at times, and at other times lacking in delicacy. The last impression irked me exceedingly. For my mother and sister to be guilty of indelicacy was strangely unpleasant, I knew they were not impelled in their new interest by affection. They did not even now care for Jane. She had become to them an enigma; that of course was something more than she had been; there was a shade of admiration now in their wondering, but no genuine feeling for her and no sympathy. Their sympathy was for Philibert, and perhaps, a little for themselves. In any case they were afraid for Philibert. They saw his great social edifice swaying. They were holding their breath. And Jane gave them no sign. Had she calculated her effect with consummate art her manner could not have been more perfectly tuned to the high fine note of suspense. And they dared not to ask her anything.

But as the weeks passed, they gave way to asking each other. In her absence they constantly talked of her. It was curious how much of their attention she took up by staying so much away. Claire and my mother could now often be heard to say--“Have you seen Jane? What is the child doing with herself? I find her looking very unwell. Has she complained to you of feeling ill?” and now and again with a sigh of reproach either my mother or Claire would say to the other--“What a pity you never won her confidence. She tells us nothing, but absolutely nothing. It’s as if she didn’t trust us.”

And Philibert seemed as much at a loss as they. He could enlighten them very little. Gradually as their nervousness made them less discreet they took to questioning him. “But what is the matter with her?” they would ask, and he would shrug his shoulders. He didn’t know. Did he think she was ill? No, she wasn’t ill, she had never been so active. Was she then unhappy? Ah, who could say? She was now and then very gay, much gayer at moments than he had ever known her. She went out constantly. She had ideas of her own about receiving. She was arranging a series of musical evenings for the audition of unpublished works of young French composers. She was multiplying her activities. Sometimes he did not see her alone for days together. And here my mother gently and timidly interrupted him. “_Mais mon enfant_, when she is alone with you, is she amiable, is she kind? _Enfin_, is she gracious?” And Philibert again, but this time with a more exaggerated movement, shrugged his shoulders--“_Comme cela._ I have no right to complain.”

And then quickly I saw them all look at each other and saw the same thought flit from one mind to the other and dodge away out of sight, and the spectacle of those intelligent evasive glances exasperated me.

“Yes, it’s a different story now, isn’t it?” I didn’t care for their combined shocked stare, now centred on myself, and continued to Philibert--“After all, you’ve got what you wanted, haven’t you? You remember you told her not to love you so much.”

“Blaise!” My mother’s exclamation was a check. I had a sensation of shaking myself free. “Well, isn’t it so? Weren’t you all awfully bored with her caring too much for you, and now that she doesn’t, now that she has withdrawn, is leading a life of her own, you are troubled, you wonder. How can you wonder? Isn’t it all quite simple?” But I knew that it was not so simple after all, so I stopped.

“You think then,” put in my sister gravely, “that she no longer cares for us?” Her tone made me stare in my turn. It was earnest and enquiring, and I heard Philibert to my astonishment echoing her words. “Ah, you believe she no longer cares?” And most wonderful of all my mother’s phrase. “Tell us, Blaise, what she does feel. I believe that you understand her better than we do.”

It was quite extraordinary. I had the strangest feeling for a moment of pride and power. They had all turned to me. They had all recognized simultaneously that I possessed something valuable. And for a moment I enjoyed the novel sensation. They wanted something from me, that was pleasant, but what they wanted was Jane’s secret. They believed she had confided in me, and they believed I would tell them. I felt again weary and impatient and humiliated, and I brought out the truth abruptly. “I know no more than you do what is going on in Jane’s mind, she has told me nothing.” But I saw that they did not believe me.

The room, my mother’s room, seemed to shrink visibly. It appeared very small and trivial. Its innumerable bibelots and souvenirs winked and glinted, mischievous and precious, minute tokens of delicate prejudice, obstinate and conventional and colourless. It all looked small and meaningless and pale. I could have laughed. I was important there at last. But it was a tiny place to me now. I pitied it. I felt suddenly free and alone. I thought--“Jane has told me nothing, it is true, nevertheless she trusts me,” and I felt them reading my mind and it didn’t matter. They might know for all I cared that I knew nothing, they would feel all the same that I knew Jane as they would never know her. But what they would never know was, that knowing Jane as I did, I knew many other things, wonderful things. I felt a lift, a lightening, a widening of space, a fresh rush of wind as if I was being blown upon by the breath of those wide American forests. Somewhere in my mind vistas opened. I heard the murmuring of a free wind in high branches. And all the time I saw my frail little mother in her damask chair, in her little crowded silken room, and I loved her with tenderness and compassion. An impulse seized me. I went over to her. I took her hand.

“If only you would love her,” I said, “everything would be all right.” Then I saw that I had blundered. How could I have been so stupid as to have imagined that they had been with me for that moment in those wide high spaces where I knew Jane lived? My words sounded grotesque and fatuous. I saw a shade come over my mother’s face. I heard Claire’s swish of impatient drapery. Philibert snorted. I felt myself blushing. My face tingled. I had made myself ridiculous. My mother’s hand kept me off. Its nervous clasp pushed me from her while she murmured plaintively--“_Mais je l’aime bien, mais je l’aime bien._”

Claire followed me out of the room. In the little dark hall we stood close together. She had closed the door of the drawing room after her. Beyond it we heard Philibert’s high nasal voice arguing. “What do you really think, Blaise?” My sister’s voice was low and confidential. I felt her mind pressing upon me with gentle insistence.

“I don’t know.”

“But you see a great deal of her, she talks to you.”

“Yes, but not about herself.”

“Come, Blaise.”

“Not about the present, only of the past, her home over there.”

She made an impatient gesture.

“Does she never mention Philibert?”

“Never in any way that matters. How can you think--? Do you imagine then that she is vulgar?”

But Claire’s eyes, tranquil and dark with their usual mournful depths of mystery, looked at me deeply as if she had not heard.

“I am afraid,” she said, “of Bianca.”

I was startled. The idea that Claire was afraid, so afraid as to voice her fear to me in that low tone of secret confidence, seemed to make everything worse, much more miserable.

“Why?” I asked, searching her face that so often evaded me with its mockery and now was so grave and deliberate.

“She may do something.”

“What?”

“I don’t know, but she’s jealous.”

“Jealous of Jane?”

“Yes, hadn’t you noticed? She follows her about?”

“Bianca follows Jane about?”

“Just that.”

I thought how strange women are, seeing things that we none of us notice. I followed Bianca, Jane and Claire in imagination, moving about Paris in smooth rapid motors, slipping in and out of crowded streets, shops, drawing-rooms, theatres, watching each other. But how could Claire see one pursuing the other with all those people round them, all the music, the waiters, the footmen, the lights scattered along dinner-tables, the obstructing tables and chairs, the endless engagements? My mind wavered, I felt dizzy. I saw each one of the three women stepping out of her car, going into her house, the door closing upon her, hiding her from the world.

I came back to Claire’s delicate face and brooding eyes.

“But why should Bianca be jealous?”

“But why not?”

“You mean she thinks Philibert is escaping her?”

“And isn’t he?”

“I don’t know.” Suddenly I felt at the end of my strength, as if I had been undergoing a great nervous strain. “How should I know anything about Philibert? You all seem to think I know what Philibert is up to.” I felt strangely exasperated. “And what, _mon dieu_, is there exactly between Bianca and Philibert?”

“Ah,” my sister smiled faintly, “that I cannot tell you, but whatever it is, it is enough.”

“Enough to make trouble, you mean?”

“Yes, enough to make trouble.”

“Well, if you really want my opinion, it is that Jane does not bother at all about Bianca.” And I began irritably to get into my coat. But Claire, helping me on with it, still pressed me and said over my shoulder--

“So you don’t think Jane in her turn is jealous?”

“I don’t think anything about it. What I think is that it is none of my business.” And I grabbed my hat and left her, but looking back as I went down the few steps to the outer door, I saw her looking after me with an inscrutable smile, as if she had learned something from me that she had wanted to know, and I determined to keep away from such family talks in future.

I had my theory about Jane during those days, of course, but according to Clémentine I was wrong. Clémentine thinks that Jane loves Philibert even now, even now over there in that dreary little house. I can’t believe it. But what does Clémentine mean by love, anyway? Clémentine is a Latin, the smooth willing exponent and devotee of her senses. She has known love--“_elle a rencontré l’amour plusieurs fois_.” If she means anything, if there’s anything in what she says about Jane, it is that Philibert still has the power to affect Jane, to make her pulse beat quicker, even now. I wonder, but I don’t want to think about it.

I believed that winter that Jane had ceased to care for Philibert, and that that was the explanation of her strangeness, that made her appear so often like a sleep-walker. I argued that to a person like Jane it would be more terrible to no longer love than to be no longer loved. There were moments when alone in my room with her image before me, I was certain that she was beginning to despise him. How could she help it I would ask myself, and be filled with an exulting bitterness. I see now what it was. I wanted her to despise him, and so believed it. But it was not so much that I fiendishly wanted Philibert to suffer, for I did not believe he would suffer. I wanted Jane to right herself. That was it. I wanted her to get loose from her bonds that seemed to me to expose her in an attitude humiliating and pitiful. I couldn’t bear to contemplate her as Philibert’s slave. It was this thought that sent me out at night to walk the streets in a fever. Ridiculous? Perhaps. But haven’t I a phrase of Jane’s sounding in my brain even now that justifies all my sickening suspicions of the past, one phrase, the only one that she ever let fall that threw any light on her relations with her husband.

It was only the other day in St. Mary’s Plains. Time had made it possible for her to speak as she did. Ten years, fifteen, had passed, but she spoke with an icy distinctness as if controlling a shudder.

“Bianca,” she said, “was jealous of that process of corruption that she called my happiness.” But this is all too painful. I must stick to the facts of my story.

Claire’s fear was all too well founded. Bianca was jealous and Bianca was going to intervene. Philibert was slipping away from her and falling in love with his stupid wife. That could not be tolerated. She stirred uneasily. Moreover Paris was beginning to take account of Jane. People were talking about her wherever one went. They argued about whether she was ugly or just the most beautiful woman in Europe. Sides were equally divided. But what did it matter whether one called it beauty or ugliness, once her appearance had made its impression upon the receptive mind of Paris? The Byzantine Madonna or the Egyptian mummy or whatever it was that she had been said to resemble had come to life. Paris recognized her as singular, and that was all that was necessary. Soon she would be the rage. Some one would set the ball rolling. Bianca saw it all quite clearly. Like a little witch bending over a boiling pot she made her preparations. It would be funny to think of if it had not come off just as she intended. The sorceress was again on the move astride her broomstick. She was chanting her incantations that were meant to bring a woman to the dust and a man to her side. But first she sent for Fan and told her all about Ivanoff and Jane and about Philibert’s interference in Biarritz. She had got the whole story from Philibert and used it now with just the effect she wished. She began lamenting the fact that she saw so little of Jane, Jane was dropping her old friends. Hadn’t Fan noticed a difference? No, Fan hadn’t. But Ivanoff--surely Jane didn’t see anything much of Ivanoff these days, not at any rate as she used to? Fan laughed. If Bianca thought Jane capable of flirting--. But Bianca meant nothing so silly. Bianca meant simply that Jane had been very foolish and that Philibert was angry with Ivanoff and wouldn’t have anything to do with him because of Jane’s foolishness. Fan at this, had grown suddenly serious. The rest was easy. It all came out. Ivanoff had had large sums of money from Jane. Philibert had found out, and Jane had made him swear to do nothing about it so that Fan should never know. This, of course had been most unfair to Ivanoff as the latter had been given no chance to clear himself with Philibert. Ivanoff might have been able to explain many things that remained obscure.

The result of this conversation was all that Bianca would wish for. Poor Fan rushed home to her dilapidated attic on the Isle St. Louis and flung it all at Ivanoff’s great sleek meek head. He had been taking money from Jane. How much money? When? Why? Where was it? How could he? How had he come to think of such a thing? Didn’t he have any sense of honour? Didn’t he have any shame? Ivanoff bowed his head. Meekly and humbly he let her rave at him until exhausted, she flung herself on the bed in a torrent of tears, and all that night he sat on the floor beside her bed, extravagantly ashamed, thinking vague dark hopeless thoughts, and now and then heaving a sigh.

It didn’t occur to him, the next day or the next or any day after that to explain anything. Probably he was unaware that Fan’s second thoughts were more poisoning and disturbing to her than the first. Ivanoff was no psychologist. If he noticed that Fan was strained and looked at him queerly, he remained passive and mute, and no light of curiosity seemed to strike down into his abysmal calm. When suddenly Fan flashed out the question--“Did you make love to her?” he merely shook his head, and when at last after a week of fidgetting she announced that she had written to Jane to tell her that they couldn’t pay the money back and that she would understand the wisdom of their not seeing each other any more, he stared vacantly, then frowned and sat down in a heap on the divan for the rest of the day. Judging by his fantastic subsequent behaviour, he must have been pondering upon the question. He probably thought--“Women are worthless cattle. Jane has told. She has given away the secret. She has hurt Fan. I am getting tired of Fan. Some day I will go away, but Jane hurt her and made her tiresome and she must be hurt too, before I go. But how? But how?” That was the difficulty. He must think of some way. And all the time he was sitting there thinking, he could hear Fan coughing and tossing in her room, and he could see her little tame chaffinches jumping about in their cage in the window. Fan was often like that, like a neat little bird flitting and hopping about, but now she was sick and ruffled and not gay and chirpy at all.

XIII

I come now to the night of old François’s ball that he gave for his daughter Bianca, that dreadful night of climax and exposure when the fabric of appearance was torn to shreds and we were left there, betrayed by ourselves to the eye of God, stark naked in all our senseless passion and trivial brutality. The experience of that night stands up for me out of the past bald and glaring in all its garish savagery like a totem pole in a glittering desert. I circle round it. The habits and tastes of civilization appear there like a mirage. I see the actors of the drama behaving like primitive creatures possessed by demons. Civilization skin deep? The banality is apt here. I have called Philibert and Bianca the spoiled darlings and perfect exponents of an ultra-refined social system, and so they were, but that didn’t prevent their behaving like a cave man and woman. The only difference was that they knew what they were doing. They were calculating and deliberate and amused. They turned loose the reckless savagery with the little dry laugh of knowledge.

I did not go to the ball myself. I had been away, had come back unexpectedly, and had found myself by some extraordinary mischance, some curious combination of circumstances, locked out of my rooms and without a key. It was late. I remember being unwilling to rouse my mother at that time of night, and standing in the street wondering which one of my friends I would ask for a bed, I don’t know why I suddenly decided to go to Philibert’s. I had never spent a night in his house in my life, but now, as if Paris were suddenly an unknown city of strangers and his roof the only prospect of shelter, I found my way in a fiacre to his bleak and imposing door.

I remember the emptiness of the house as I entered, the great silent entrance hall with its sleepy porter, and the coldness of the wide marble stairway and my unwillingness in spite of the solicitations of a couple of men servants to go to bed anywhere in any one of the blank luxurious rooms offered to me, until Philibert or Jane came home to authorize me to do so. “_Monsieur et Madame_ would undoubtedly be very late,” the footman told me, “they were ‘_chez Monsieur le duc_,’ where there was a ball.” I listened vaguely, accepted a tray of refreshments and sent the men to bed, saying that I would wait up for the master. But the wine and biscuits placed in the library did not tempt me to ease or somnolence. I felt restless and oppressed. How big the place was to house a man and a woman and a child. What a distance to little Geneviève’s nursery. I picked up a book, put it down. A long mirror opposite me reflected a portion of the great high shadowy room and my own small wizened figure seated like a gnome in a circle of light. The sight of myself, always unpleasant, set me wandering. I turned on lights here and there. All was still and smooth with the vast ordered beauty of a cold enchanted palace. The thought of Philibert’s success as a house decorator passed through my mind without engaging my attention, that seemed somehow to be fixed on something else, something deep and elusive that had a meaning could I but find it. What did they stand for, those high polished walls with their lovely panellings? What did they enclose beyond so many treasures of art? The rare still air in those gleaming spaces seemed to have a quality, a presence, cold, enigmatic, and final. I tiptoed round the immense deserted salons like a thief. I waited and waited with a growing sense of the ominous, and then at last I heard the whirr of a motor coming into the porte cochère, and going out along the gallery to the great wide shadowy stairhead, I looked down and saw the light flash out, filling the vast white lower hall, and saw Jane come in alone, trailing her long gleaming draperies behind her, and advance across that expanse of marble like a woman in a trance, holding up and out in her hand before her, well away from her as if she were afraid of it, a small object that I identified when she had almost reached the top of those interminable stairs as a small dead bird with a jewelled pin run through its body.

She spoke in a queer tired voice that grated slightly.

“I found it in the car, on the cushion. Ivanoff must have put it there. It is one of Fan’s birds. A chaffinch--you see--He meant it as a symbol.”

It was as if her teeth were almost chattering, and she were controlling that shaking of jaws with an effort. And as she spoke, I saw Ivanoff distinctly, taking that tiny feathered thing out of its cage and wringing its neck with his strong brown fingers, and smiling through his slits of eyes. Jane continued to hold it out before her and stared at it. Presently she said again in that queer rasping voice--

“Look, it’s quite dead. It has been speared through the heart. The pin is one I gave Fan years ago. The bird is her pet chaffinch. My Aunt Patience used to tame chaffinches. There was one that used to perch on her head while she worked. That was in St. Mary’s Plains.”

She stopped and looked at me a moment in silence enquiringly. We were standing at the head of the stairs. Something in my face must have arrested her attention. “Come,” she said in a sudden tone of command. “Come into the drawing room. We will wait together for Philibert.” She said the last three words much more loudly than the others. They seemed to go rolling down the long gallery like rattling stones. I remember thinking that she must be very ill and that I ought to persuade her to go to bed. We moved in the direction of the drawing rooms. She was dressed in some shining glittering sheathlike thing of a silvery tone and wore emeralds in her ears and on her hands. Her eyes were as green as her earrings, and her face the colour of yellowish white wax. She dragged a chinchilla cloak after her as if it were terribly heavy. It had slipped off her shoulders and I noticed that her skin was covered with little beads of moisture. I thought--“The Lady of the Seas.” She looked as if she had been in an accident--been wounded somewhere. I half expected to see a red spot spreading over her side as she let fall her cloak in the great drawing room and turned on, one after another, a blazing circle of lights. The effect was startling. There was no stain of blood on her gown, but the livid pallor of her face and arms in that glare of light suggested that she was all the same in the state of one who had all but bled to death. Under the glittering lustre of many crystals, her face was a gaunt mask of yellowish bone and pale greenish shadow, and her lips were drawn tight across gleaming teeth. Her expression was famished, thirsty, breathless.

I was frightened, and at the same time strangely excited. Where was Philibert? What was the meaning of Jane’s feverish icy glitter? Why were we there, she and I, at three o’clock in the morning, transfixed in a blaze of artificial light in a room that was as inimical as a palace in Hell? As she turned away and moved to the mantelpiece, where she stood with her back to me, leaning her elbows on the black carved marble, I had a moment’s respite. What did she want me for? Wouldn’t Philibert think it queer our waiting up for him in such ridiculous solemnity. I addressed her long shining back.

“Do you often wait up for him?” She turned half way round.

“No, but tonight we must wait, we must wait until we know.”

Her words gave me a feeling of weakness. I was obliged to sit down. All that light, all that gleaming parquet, all those precious cabinets, full of rare glimmering treasures, and the night outside, wheeling towards day, and Philibert coming from somewhere in a motor, and all the people of Paris sleeping, quite still, in their beds but being whirled through space on a turning globe, made me dizzy. I heard her say from a great distance--

“Fan is not dead. She was at the ball. She avoided me. She looked very ill. Ivanoff wanted to frighten me. I would have been, if I hadn’t been more frightened by something else. Fan was my friend, so was Bianca. I have no friends now. It is very strange to be quite alone when things are going to happen.”

“What is going to happen?” I tried to speak naturally.

“I don’t know. We must wait. We will find out.”

She came across to me and then looked at me shyly. It was suddenly as if she had come to herself again, and whereas she had seemed terribly old, as old as a deathless woman of some strange legend, she was now for a moment merely young and helpless and unhappy.

“You will be a friend to me, won’t you?” she asked dropping into a chair before me. I nodded, unable to speak.

And so we sat on in the centre of that immense room in two gilt fauteuils under the full glare of the chandelier. Occasionally she said something, then would sink into silence and seem to forget that I was there. But each time that the clock on the mantelpiece struck the quarter or the half hour she would start convulsively.

At a quarter to four she said--“Ivanoff meant me to feel that I had broken Fan’s heart, but Fan is all right. I saw her. She looked quite happy tonight and she danced continually. What does that mean--a broken heart? What makes one feel pain in one’s left side when one is unhappy? Just the power of suggestion? Perhaps if that power were strong enough it would affect the actual heart in one’s body, make it burst in one’s side.” Then without transition, “I would have sent for my Aunt Patience, but I did not want her to know. I was safe in her house. Sometimes I think of the Grey House as the only safe place in the world. If I went back there now, I wonder if I would feel the same, or whether it would seem very small and stuffy and shabby. My people there were very simple people. They loved me. They were all very religious except my Aunt Patty who believed in science. One ought to believe in something--I don’t. I can’t. I joined the Catholic Church to please Philibert but I don’t believe. If my Aunt Beth knew she would worry about my eternal life. I wonder if I would find that a nuisance or just the most touching thing in the world. I wonder if they would all look like funny old frumps or seem quite beautiful. One can’t tell.”

Her voice stopped. We sat in a silence that grew steadily more tense and unbearable. The clock struck four and she started to her feet, and a spasm twisted her features and she began to talk very rapidly while at the same time she seemed to be panting for breath.

“I have found out tonight. I found out at the ball. It was like a revelation from heaven. I saw it all in a blinding burst. The noise of the music, the crowd, pale faces wheeling round me, bobbing ducking, they couldn’t hide it from me. Bianca was there, at the centre, cold, sharp, like a silver needle, watching Philibert, drawing him to her like a magnet. Every one was there. I was alone. I saw Fan in the distance. She avoided me, but I heard her coughing and her high little voice crying out through her hacking cough to some one--‘Yes, my dear, I’m dying. Why not? 39 of fever, but I simply had to come. What’s a woman’s life worth if she can’t dance.’ And then that cough again. Every one danced interminably. I saw Aunt Clothilde sitting like a bronze fountain with a watershed of grey silk spreading all round her, in a corner of the library; she was saying witty things in her squeaky voice to solemn old men in wigs. I stood alone in a window, watching Bianca watch Philibert. I must have spoken to a number of people, I don’t remember. Hands reached for mine, voices murmured, voices addressed me by name. Other voices laughed and whispered and cried out round me. The music throbbed. Faces whirled past. Some women shrieked and giggled out in the garden. Waiters and footmen moved about. Motors hooted in the street. The waves of darkness welled up behind me to meet the waves of light rolling out of the hot rooms. I was cold, cold as ice, my face burning. Some one going past shouted at me, ‘I say, you look ghastly. Have something?’ I didn’t answer. I was watching Bianca. Bianca was my friend--I loved her. I watched men and women approach her, touch her fingers, move away. I watched other men circle round her, keep coming back, hang forward humbly, shoulders hunched, heads bowed, waiting for a word from her, fascinated men who desired and pleased her. Philibert was among them, but he didn’t hang forward bowing. He stood near her, twirling his moustaches, talking to one and then another, making gestures, laughing, frowning, snubbing people, being impertinent, being amusing, flattering old dowagers, glaring at presumptuous youths, criticizing women with his cold eyes, and every now and then exchanging a look with Bianca. They scarcely spoke to each other, but I could see their communion was uninterrupted. I saw and understood--He has always loved her. They have always been together like that, always. That is what I have found out, and more, more. It was so before I came, before he met me, while we were engaged, when we were married, always Bianca, she was always there.

“Tonight I saw them together, perfectly. I watched them. I wanted to fathom them, to know what it was they possessed between them. I knew it was evil. I longed to know their evil. The sight of Bianca roused in me a horrible envy. I stood like a stone watching her. She used to be my friend--I loved her. Evil appeared to me upon her face beautiful, shining out like a sickly light, potent, alluring. Suddenly I heard a squeaky voice say--‘Come here, child. You shouldn’t show yourself with a face like that. If it’s so bad lock yourself up. Men are all brutes. Some day you won’t care.’ I looked at your Aunt Clothilde, blind with rage, you know, blind, and turned and went out through the window into the garden. At the far end in the dark I walked up and down alone. The music and the light streamed out of the long windows. I saw innumerable heads bobbing. It looked like a madhouse. Philibert and Bianca were in there together, cool, sane, infinitely wise. I was the insane person. At one o’clock I went in again and crossed to where Philibert stood beside Bianca and asked him if he were ready to come home. Bianca was in white. She was almost naked. She had a cloud of white round her and her body was as visible through it as a silver lily through water. She looked fresh and cool as dew. Philibert answered but did not look at me. ‘You need not wait,’ was what he said, but I was watching Bianca’s face and I saw there something else. Her eyes were wide open. They poured their meaning into mine. Her face was like a still white flower holding two drops of deadly poison. She did not move. She did not smile. It was all in her eyes. I looked down into them for an instant, one instant. It was enough. I had a feeling as I turned away of coming up out of a great depth, of breaking a spell. The Duke took me through the rooms to the top of the stairs. I walked beside him, my hand on his arm. I didn’t look back. I left them together.

“I found Ivanoff’s dead bird in the car. It didn’t frighten me. But I was frightened. I felt as I drove away like some one who has had a narrow escape, a very close shave. Why? What was it? Nothing had happened, nothing visible, nothing to disturb the still immensity of the spell-bound avenue. I drove on alone, up the Champs Elysées. The sky was studded like a shield with hard pointed stars. The double row of roundheaded lamps lining the black gleaming surface of the pavement stood like sentinels put there to conduct me out through the Arc de Triomphe into desolate uncharted space. I held Ivanoff’s dead bird in my hand, and I felt as if I were driving away from that crowded ball room straight over the rim of the earth. The sight of you here, at the top of the stairs brought me to my senses. I remembered. I understood on the instant of seeing you that I had wanted to kill Bianca, tonight. That was what had frightened me. That was my close shave. You stood there, worried and tired and kind. I recognized you.”

Her voice stopped suddenly. She covered her face with her hands. I rose to my feet and took a step towards her, and just then the clock struck five and its little gilt angel stepped out with his tiny jewelled trumpet. She whirled towards it, lifting her face that was drawn like an old woman’s.

“Philibert will not come ... I know now,” she whispered. “He has gone away with Bianca.” She swayed, looked this way and that around the wide gleaming room, them at me, holding out her hands. “Help me, Blaise.”

In a moment she had given way to sobbing. Ah, then, then I, who had never touched so much as her hair or her cheek or the fold of her dress, then indeed, I would have taken her in my arms to comfort her, as one takes a child. But she was the great strong creature, I was the weakling. I could only kneel by her chair and try to steady her convulsed frame and heaving shoulders with my own arm round them in futile incompetent anguish, while I heard her heart breaking as if it were so much strong stuff being splintered there in her side.

It was six o’clock when she went to her room. The servants were not yet about. The house was still, impenetrably calm, the curtains still drawn, the formality of its beautiful equanimity unchanged.

Six o’clock; Bianca and Philibert were well on their way by that time, travelling south, rolling smoothly along over long white roads between mysterious poplars in a misty dawn. They had provisions with them in the car. I can see them now as I think back, opening a bottle of champagne, eating sandwiches, and I can hear their laughter. They were very gay, very pleased with the way they had done it. They had walked straight out of François’ house together at three thirty in the morning, had stepped into the motor in the presence of a crowd of departing guests, and had disappeared. The audacity of the thing was of a kind to tickle them immoderately. They must have laughed a good deal. I wonder that Jane and I, spellbound under that glaring chandelier, didn’t hear them. Strange that the echoes of their light laughter didn’t travel back to us across that widening distance, while we waited and listened. Strange to think of that old _roué_ François wandering back through his emptied rooms, among the débris of that night’s festival, all unsuspecting. Very curious to think of Philibert and Bianca murmuring to each other, their laughter giving way to the bitter and exultant growling of their excited senses, while I led Jane back to her room. No one saw her go tottering down the hall leaning against me. No one saw her swollen face looking through the door and trying to smile at me before she closed herself in alone.