PART II

I

That was long ago. We were young then. What a haunting annoying phrase. One meets it everywhere, in books, on people’s lips, or unspoken in their eyes. The other day in the Grey House, sitting opposite Jane in the shabby little parlour, there it was again. She spoke it, but not wistfully, more with relief than regret. I stayed ten days in St. Mary’s Plains and during those days she told me the rest of the story, bit by bit, till she came to the end--I put it down now as she told it--what follows are her own words as I remember them.

* * * * * * * *

That was the end of my youth and the beginning of life. Until then I had been made use of, but after that I acted and I became responsible for myself.

Fifteen years ago, we sat till morning waiting for Philibert. I no longer remember what I felt. Have you tried to recall sensations of pain, and by thinking very closely about all the little circumstances surrounding them, to experience again the stab or the ache? One can’t. I can’t feel again that agony. I suppose it was agony. You remember it better than I do, for you saw it. One remembers things one has seen and things one did, but not what went on inside one’s own dark, impenetrable body and soul, invisibly. I remember what I did at that time and what I said and what other people said and looked. I remember your face, and Jinny’s fear of me, and her fretting for her father, and Fan’s coming and saying that I looked like a mad woman, and from these facts I deduce the other fact that I was suffering, but I have forgotten the feeling. That is very strange when you come to think of it, for how, then, can I know that it was so? I don’t know. It is all merely conjecture. One would have thought, from the way I behaved and the way it changed everything that my emotion of that time was tremendous; was immensely important. But it wasn’t. It had no substance. It didn’t stand the test of time. It has vanished completely. Other things have lasted.

What are these feelings, emotions, passions that we make such a fuss about? Nothing but sparks struck from an impact, a collision of some kind. They seem to burn us up, to consume us for a moment, then they vanish. They have no body, no staying power, no reality, but we mould our lives by them.

I am a woman. My life has always centred about people. In tracing the course of events, I find that their causes were invariably personal--My life is a long strong twisted rope made up of a number of human relationships, nothing more. There was first my mother, and my Aunt Patience, then Philibert, Bianca and Geneviève. Philibert went away. I did without him. One can do without anything,--everything. I am proving it now. But Bianca kept coming back; I never got rid of her.

My life is a failure. It is finished. It is there in its dreadful, unchangeable completeness spread out before me. I look at it, as I would look at a map, and when I think that it is I who made it, this thing called a human life, I am bewildered and ashamed. How did it come about that I made so many mistakes, and did so much that was harmful to others? There was no desire in my heart to hurt, no will to do wrong. On the contrary I wanted to make people happy, I wanted to do right. It is very strange. It is almost as if the intensity of my will to do right forced me to do the wrong thing. Is there some explanation? Is there a key to the problem of living that I never found? Or was it all simply due to Bianca? My Aunt Beth used to say that the only way to live rightly was to do the will of God. But what does that mean? How is one to know what the will of God is? Often I wonder whether my failure is due to my never having found out about God. Most of my people here in America would not hesitate to say yes--but I am not sure. It seems to me that I was even more eager to do His will than I would have been if I had been certain of His existence. It would have been an immense relief to me to have known that God was in His Heaven and that I did not have to bother about my own soul. “Put your troubles on the Lord,” our parson used to say in St. Mary’s Plains. Well--I don’t know. That is a solution for many. If they do that--just shelve everything and go by texts in the Bible for their order of daily conduct, living must be very much simplified--but I couldn’t do that. Something stiff and hard and honest in me wouldn’t allow it. I couldn’t believe that I could talk to God and ask His opinion. I used to try--when I was a child and when I was a woman. Praying was like whispering into a chasm, a void, an echoing emptiness. My questions came back to me, unanswered, mocking echoes of my own tormented soul.

So I floundered along.

I do not excuse myself. I am to blame. I am responsible. I know that. I lived among charming people. I had, as people say, almost everything heart can desire. My husband did not love me, but beyond that what had I to complain of? I had money, health, power, friends. I was one of the fortunate. Hundreds of women, no doubt, envied me.

I hadn’t the gift of living. Your mother has it, so has your sister. It is common among French people, they are artists in life, but I was for ever looking beyond life for its purpose, and thus missing its savour and its meaning. The people I loved were too important to me and the people I hated--but I can see now that Bianca wasn’t as interesting or as important as she seemed. She was only a vain and selfish woman after all. But she was for twenty years my obsession.

I must talk about Bianca. It was really in order to talk about Bianca that I asked you to come, for I am not yet rid of her. She haunts me here in this innocent old house. Enigmatic in death as she was in life, her personality persists, exquisite and depraved and relentless. She comes to accuse me. Having ruined my life, she accuses me of her death.

I did not kill her. Some of you thought that I did. You didn’t mind. You didn’t blame me, but you thought so. Ludovic, I am sure, is convinced of it, and if he does not precisely approve, he at least accepts the fact as the inevitable outcome of our long exhausting duel. More than once he told me that until I could rid myself of the obsession of Bianca, I should be unable to understand the first little thing about life. He was the one person who understood my feeling for her and hers for me. In his uncanny wisdom, so devoid of all prejudice, he knew that our hatred was based upon an intense mutual attraction, and that we hounded each other to death because under other circumstances we would have loved each other. The long and dreary spectacle of two women hating each other for years with intense sympathy, or if you like, loving each other with an exasperating antagonism and hatred, was to him pitiful and contemptible. He would have had me put an end to it somehow, anyhow, at any cost. Taking another’s life is to him no crime compared to ruining one’s own. Well, it is at an end now. Bianca is dead, and I am buried alive. We did each other in, but it took twenty years, and I never touched her with my hands, or did anything to bring about her death, save will her to die.

And her death came too late to do me or mine any good. Philibert was finished. My life was in pieces. There was nothing left to patch up. She had come between me and my husband and child, while living, but her death cut me off from them, more absolutely than anything she could have done alive. And, fiendishly, as if with consummate cunning, she died mysteriously leaving with me the unanswerable question, as to whether or not, I had made her kill herself. I go over and over it all, day after day, week in, week out. I remember my last view of her alive, in that hotel corridor, the look she gave me over her drooping shoulder, leaning against the half open door, her hand on the door knob, her long languid weight on it, one pointed foot trailing, and on her grey face, a desperate vindictive longing, a wistful cruelty, a question, a threat, a prayer. Was she at last imploring me? Did she in that moment remember everything? Was she mutely and bitterly asking me to come and hear her confession? Would it all have been put right by some miracle had I gone to her before it was too late? I don’t know--I shall never know. I only know that our wills clashed again for the last time, that for the last time I resisted her, and let her drag the incredible weight of her diseased and disappointed spirit out of my sight, for ever.

And how am I to know that her death wasn’t an accident, and that her look of desperate appeal wasn’t just such a piece of acting as she had treated me to, at intervals for twenty years? Over and over again, she had done the same trick. Invariably, after one of her pieces of devilry, she would approach me with that wistful penitent masque, and stir me to forgiveness and compassion. Repeatedly, she fooled me. I could save her--I could influence her for good. I was strong and balanced and sane. If only I would give her what she needed, what she lacked, some relief from herself in some external thing, some faith, some definite obstinate purpose, beyond the gratification of her own vanity.

And each time I believed, each time I forgave, each time looking into her wonderful face, I thought I saw there, a spiritual meaning. It is enough to make one scream with laughter. It was all acting. It must have been. It was all done for the purpose of tormenting me more exquisitely afterwards. For years she fooled me--for years I wouldn’t believe she was what she was, a woman of immense personality and no character, but I am at last certain that this was so. Ludovic says that it takes as strong a character to be really wicked as really good. He used to rave over Bianca, to anger me, I suppose, call her perversely--“_une femme admirable--la plus courageuse damnée qu’il avait jamais vue_.” I don’t agree with him. I do not mean that Bianca had a weak character. I mean literally that she had no character at all. Where one feels in the average human being, the strong resisting kernel, the stern spiritual centre that contains identity there in Bianca there was nothing. At the middle centre of her being there was emptiness. She had, morally, no core. She was as formless as one of those genii in the Arabian Nights who came out of Ali Baba’s earthenware pots.

I ought to know, for I loved her. She was my friend during the happiest years of my life, when I believed in Philibert, and was confident. I say it again, we were friends. I believe even now, in our early friendship, in those days, Bianca was actually, and much to her own surprise, fond of me. That she began being nice to me out of a spirit of mischief is no doubt true. The idea of making Philibert’s wife, her intimate, was the sort of thing likely to appeal to her but having made the advances out of perversity, she found herself interested and attracted. Why did she like me? It is difficult to say. Perhaps because I was a new type and one that wouldn’t in the ordinary course of events come her way. I puzzled her. To her I was something primitive, savage, and dangerous. She used to call me her “_Peau Rouge_.” She said I made her think of Buffaloes and Bison and prehistoric animals, of black men round camp fires in jungles, of snake dancers and deserts and the infantile magic of savage races. She wove stories about me and hunted up old prints of queer outlandish people who she insisted had my type of head. I was, she asserted, only half-tame, and being with me gave her the same kind of pleasure as having a leopard about. She was physically afraid of me. Not only at the beginning, but always to the very end, but in those days, my losing my temper, she found, “_un très beau spectacle_.” Her blue eyes would shine, her lips part in amazement, and timidly she would stroke my shoulder, murmuring--“How wonderful you are. What a volcano.”

She used to ask me endless questions about my childhood and appeared greatly intrigued by my obstinate attachment to what she affectionately termed, my ridiculous impossible background. She would make me tell her about life in the Grey House, the baking of cakes in the kitchen, the hymn singing on Sunday evenings, and the summer trips to the wilderness, to the woods of Canada, or across the prairies of Omaha, Dakota, and Arizona. She would lie on her couch in her boudoir making patterns in the air with her lovely fingers and purring like a pleased little cat while I described the plains, stretching endlessly under the sky to the white horizon, the lonely wooden shacks blistered in the sun, and infested with flies, the lazy cowboys on indefatigable loping broncos--and she would murmur--“_Ah, je comprends cela--c’est grand, c’est monstrueux, c’est beau._”

As for me, need I explain why I loved her? Who has not felt the quality of her beauty? What man or woman that ever saw Bianca, failed to respond to the peculiar penetrating charm of her personality? I see her in memory, a vivid creature, perfect, compact, clear in the midst of a crowd of blurred and colourless shadows. Her beauty was incisive, keen. It cut into one’s consciousness sharp as a stab. It stamped itself on one’s brain, indelible and certain. I see her face as clearly today as I saw it the day I first laid eyes on her when she came up to me in your mother’s salon and said--“You must like me, I insist.” It is there close to me, rising out of the grave as pure, as firm, as precisely drawn as if I held the perfect indestructible masque in my hand.

I see her eyes open lazily, wider and wider, and shine out suddenly, bluest blue, so blue that they seem to send out a blue light through their black lashes. Ah, how lovely she was! How could I not believe in that loveliness? Blue, brilliant fire-blue eyes set far apart under a fringe of black hair and pointed curving thin red lips. I could model her now exactly--the cup of her small chin, her long round white throat, flat bosom and shoulders flowing down thin arms to her narrow beautiful hands. Her body was a fragile thing, strong as steel.

And women of Bianca’s breeding never give themselves away in ordinary life. They are closed and secret books, open only to those who have the key. No one can read them who is not of the initiated. I did not know the language. There was nothing about her to convey to me that she was anything more than she seemed, a remarkable and gifted woman of great distinction, a creature so refined as to seem to me to belong to another planet from the one on which I had been born. It seemed to me extraordinary that such a person should notice me at all. I was filled with gratitude. I was humble, devoted, flattered, and Philibert gave no sign. If not actually enthusiastic about our friendship, he still seemed content enough, and I was happy in the thought, that this wonderful woman who had been his comrade from childhood was now, my friend too.

And she was careful, as we grew more intimate, to show me, only those aspects of herself that she knew would flatter and delight me. Never did she mention subjects likely to frighten me. Her talk was all of art shows and music and books and the ridiculous absurdities of “_le monde_” and those things in her life that I couldn’t help noticing with concern, she explained in a way to enlist my sympathy. She was desperately unhappy, she told me, in her marriage, her husband’s immorality was a great grief to her; the sorrow of her life was, that she could have no children and so on, and so on. Once she even confided to me that there was insanity in her family, and that she was constantly haunted by the fear of going insane. I was, at this, in a tumult of sympathy. I was prepared to forgive her a far greater number of eccentricities than she ever showed me.

She was, she told me, of a mixed strain of southern blood, a Venetian on her mother’s side, on her father’s a _Provençale_. From her I learnt that the old Duke, her father, was descended from the _Comtes de Provence_ of a line that had numbered kings in the middle ages. For many generations they had been _Seigneurs_ of a wild and mountainous region north of Avignon. Their fortress, the “_Château des Trois Maries_” stands high against the sky on a spur of rock that reaches out from the ragged hills, above the wide valley of the Rhône. This was Bianca’s home. There in that sad and wonderful country of brown sunlight, she was as nearly happy as she could ever be on earth. I went to Provence with her one summer. And now that she is dead, I think of her, not as she was in Paris, languid, perverse, and irritable, but as she was in her own country. I see her against the swarthy background of those ruined hills scarred by the hordes of invading Saracens. Her little person seems to ride above that sunbaked land of blistered roads and dry river beds, on the wings of legend through a burning and sanguinary past of repeated invasions; of Barbary pirates from across the sea to the south, and Visigoths from the north, of wandering Bohemians, of steady marching Roman armies, of Popes flying from Italy for refuge, of gentle saints stranded in tiny boats on the desolate marshy shores of the _Camargue_ and I see her as she ought to have been and as she was sometimes, down there, her face brown, her blue eyes flashing, and her thin body, lean and hard, mounted on one of the small fleet horses of the country, galloping at the head of the thundering fighting bulls towards the arenas of Nimes or Arles. This was her proper setting. It was here at the _Château des Trois Maries_ that she showed herself to me, as she would have been had she not been accursed.

I remember one day in her room in the west tower of the Castle, her talking of herself, as she never talked to me before or since, honestly, as honestly as she could, and with light laughter breaking into her short light biting phrases. From the high window we could see the white dust of the road whirling down the valley before the hot scurrying wind, groves of poplars bending their plumed heads, little brown houses surrounded by close vineyards huddled behind screens of cypress trees.

“I was born here,” she said, “of a woman who loathed her husband and hated this country--but I wasn’t really born--I was made by witches one hot windy midsummer day. They made me out of the burning sun and the shrieking mistral and the hot white dust, in the black shade of cypresses, and they added to the hot mixture, ice water from that mountain stream; then they each laid on me a curse. One said, the oldest and wickedest--‘She will covet the earth, but only love herself.’ The second said ‘She will be haunted by the evil spirits of dead men.’ The third said--‘Since the people of this country are fond of wild jokes and pranks,--they are you know, _très blagueurs, les Provençaux_, she will be much given to playing mischievous jokes that will do others harm.’ Then they left me in the dark cypress grove, where my mother who was wandering about and longing for the laughter and music of her Italy, found me. She, poor darling, invoked the three Marys for my protection, _les Saintes Maries de la Mer_ who are carved in the stone over the great door, _Marie Salomé_, _Marie Jacobé_ and _Marie Madeleine_; their shrine is in the grotto behind the house--but they had been shipwrecked themselves and were too inefficient to cope with my witches--and so that you see is what I am--burning hot and icy cold, and with a dry wind, shrieking in my heart, and three times accursed. I feel it. I know it. I have known it since I was a child--At first I struggled, then gave in, took my curses in my arms and made them mine, made them, I tell you--my religion--” She gave her dry laugh. Her voice was high and sweet and careless. She spoke, without passion, in her dry conversational tone. “If I could never love any one but myself, never forget myself, try as I might in excesses of every kind, then I would love myself utterly. If I was to be haunted by the unfulfilled ideas of men and women long dead, then I would give myself up to those ideas, and if my pranks were fated to do people harm, well--what business was it of mine? I would enjoy doing people harm--idiots that they are, why should I care for their thin silly feelings?

“You think I am talking nonsense. If you believed me, you would be horrified--_eh, bien_--be horrified--but you will never understand. You will never believe that I am as bad as I am. That is the reason I like you--that is the reason I talk to you. You are obstinate and faithful and strong--and beside that you have demons too--I see them in your awful sullen face that I like.

“I tell you--that I am used by ideas that are not my own--that do not come out of my own head, that come to me from I know not where. They come persistently--out of the sky, circling back again and again like black birds coming out of the sky to this tower. For instance; an idea comes to me that I must go to Nimes and see a certain matador and send for him and make him love me--I know he will be stupid and coarse and disgusting, and I refuse. Then things happen. Every day lines appear in the papers--his name is everywhere, in every village on every stable wall--I laugh--and give in--and it is all stale and horrid before it begins, but the idea had to be carried out. That you will say is just the stupid giving into caprice of any idle woman--but it is not always so ordinary. Suppose that some day the idea comes to me that I must entice my husband into the oubliette. I laugh at the idea and chase it away. Six months later it comes back more insistent, a thing with a voice. It says ‘Get him into the north tower. He is a mean creature. He will fall down the oubliette’--and I say peevishly--‘But I don’t mind his being alive--he doesn’t bother me, I am not interested in killing him’ and again I drive away the idea--but it will come back, it will keep coming back till it is satisfied. There have been many ideas like that demanding of me to be satisfied. Sooner or later I carry them out--do their bidding. Often in hours of lucidity I see how dangerous they are. I fight against them, distract myself with some idiocy or run away--take the train, go in the opposite direction--but almost always I give in, in the end.” She stopped. I see her now against the stone coping of the window, leaning out--her head in the sun--looking down--the wall fell sheer--a hundred feet of masonry and rock. “Sometimes I think I will throw myself down to get rid of them, these ideas of men and women whose restless bones are the hot dust of these mountains--but why should I--why give myself as a sacrifice? It would be silly--the people I will hurt if I live aren’t worth it--”

She jerked back into the room and came to my side, laying a hand on my shoulder, and standing so that I could not see her, a little behind me, her lips close to my ear. “There are other things,” she whispered, “worse things--ideas--that I couldn’t tell--” Her fingers clutched my shoulder, tightening until they hurt me--“You help me, but sometimes I am angry with you for being what you are and want to hurt you. Some day, who knows, the idea may come to me to do you harm. You are safe now because I don’t understand you, and feel you are stronger than I--but if I ever detected a weakness in you--or if you ever bored me, then I should hate you, then I would certainly do you a hurt. It’s a warning--” she broke off with a laugh, kissed lightly the tip of my ear and left me.

I was not afraid of her then--what she said did not disturb me. I laughed at it; I was happy and confident. I had everything in the world I wanted, and I lived in a daze of joy and excitement--Europe, Paris, the miracles produced by my wealth, still dazzled and amazed me; going to bull-fights with Bianca, or hunting wild boar, with the old Duke, or attending the Courts of Rome, Vienna, Berlin or St. James’s with Philibert, everything was marvellous. I had no time to worry, and no reason to do so that I knew of.

But I remembered what Bianca had said, and in the light of what happened, I understood that she had been speaking the truth. It was simply her way of admitting that she was a supreme egotist. Put simply, it meant that the one motive power in her, was her vanity. It was her vanity that held her together and gave her an outline. And as she grew older she developed it as other women develop a gift for music. She worshipped herself, and she made of her egotism an elaborate religion. Her adoration of herself grew into a passion and burned with the ardour of a saint’s miraculously revealed inspiration. She would have gone to the stake for it. It incased her in complete armour. No one and nothing could touch her through it. She was the only woman I have ever known who lived consistently and exclusively for herself, and she did so with the sustained passion of a religious maniac. One can only compare her to a Savanorola.

Her vanity was her power and her curse. It was an ogre. It had to be fed. Human beings were thrown to it as to the devouring dragons in fairy tales. We were all victims. I was, and you were, and Philibert and Jinny, and Micky and Fan and all the others. Insatiable vanity, that was all there was to Bianca in the last analysis. That was all the meaning of her, but its manifestations, its results, its devious ways of arriving at its own ends, these were infinite, would fill volumes.

You can see how the curse would operate. It operated through her intelligence. Had she been stupid, all would have been well, but concentrated on the study and care of herself, elaborating year after year her attentions to herself, nursing her body, her face, her senses, supplying to herself stimulants and soothing preparations, searching for curious new sensations, she was aware of her own limited power to please herself. Distinctly she perceived something beyond her reach, a quality of experience outside her range, a beauty she could not attain. She would have liked best to have been a queen of love, whom all men adored, like the radiant Simonetta--fairy queen of Florence, beautifully worshipped by an entire population, and she only succeeded in being _la femme fatale_. With no gladness in her soul, she could not inspire gladness--always in the faces of her victims she saw a reflection of her own darkness. If occasionally, in the lurid light of the excitement she could so easily evoke, she saw in a man’s face a flash that resembled joy, ecstacy, delight, she as often saw it fade to a dismal stupidity, or rage or disgust. Impossible for her to create anything more than an imitation of bliss. Her egoism spoiled its own gratification. It contained poison. Her touch was magical and deadly. This, in the end, bored her. She used to complain exasperatedly of people being afraid of her. The care with which they succumbed disgusted her. Men grovelling at her feet, men writing sentimental verses, men touching her with clumsy hands; she came to loathe them. There was nothing in it; she wanted something else, something out of the ordinary, something continually surprising, unexpected, dramatic. Alas! Humanity goes its stolid way comfortably enough in spite of the Biancas of the world. Men will “play up” to a certain point. They will pretend to be dying of love to please a beautiful lady’s caprice, but they won’t really die. One of the things Bianca longed for was to have a crop of suicides laid to her account. She would have been pleased had some of her victims blown their brains out, but somehow they didn’t. They only threatened to do so. Once out of her sight, they recovered the normal and sallied forth from her boudoir to enjoy fat beefsteaks.

Her tragedy lay in understanding what she missed. She observed that inferior people experienced a range of feeling of which she was incapable. Insignificant women inspired the passions she longed to inspire. She envied and despised them. She envied every happy woman her happiness, every lover his love; her eyes watched them all, with curiosity, disdain and exasperation.

What in me began, after our three years of harmony, to get on her nerves, was my monotonous and exclusive feeling for Philibert. That such a sentiment should continue to absorb me and satisfy me, after five years of marriage was too much for her. She became irritable and teasing. She began to make fun of my love for my husband. She called it stupid, vulgar, grotesque, indecent. I lost my temper, she grovelled, enjoying that, but when next we met she began again, professing an extraordinary merriment at the sight of my mawkish sentimentality. With a sudden flash of insight I accused her of envy. She grew livid. In a choking whisper, she told me that Philibert for his part was no such idiot and that all I had to do was to look about me to find out the truth. I left her in a rage and stayed away. I did not see her again until the night of her ball, some months later, to which I went, knowing that she had determined to take Philibert away from me. It was the fact that Philibert as she believed had begun to care for me, that made her finally act. She simply couldn’t bear to think that Philibert and I should come to understand and truly care equally for each other.

I went to her ball to make a scene, to frighten her into giving him back to me, but I did nothing. I didn’t speak to her. I didn’t go near her. I simply stood and watched her. The sight of her paralysed me. I realized that no man who had ever known and loved Bianca, could care for me. And I came away, knowing that between me and Philibert, everything was ended, and I came away terrified. As I left the house, I remember muttering to myself “I must escape”--“I must escape.” Escape from what? I don’t know. From them both, from what they had done, from what they stood for, from the world of treachery and deadly pleasure to which they belonged.

But I did not get away. I never got away. I never escaped from Bianca. I never got out of range of the sense of her presence and of her infernal charm. I still cared for her. Hating her, I still wondered that she could have hurt me, still wept and called out to her in the dark at night to know why she had done it, still felt her to be the most fascinating woman I had ever known, and it was this that made my jealousy of Philibert unbearable and fiendish. I had been twice betrayed and I knew loving them both, and knowing them both, precisely the quality of the delight they had in each other.

And I knew too, that Bianca was acting as she did because of me--even more than because of Philibert. I was conscious and I was convinced that she was conscious that the real meaning of the whole thing lay in her feeling for me. There was between us, a relationship that had become hateful, but that was still going on, a thing that was going to endure, a mutual sympathy outraged and hideous now, but persisting. If she had only wanted Philibert--well, she had him already. No--what she wanted was to hurt me. And making all allowances for the attraction between them, had it not been for me, he would not have inspired her with a sufficient energy to bolt with him. The situation would have lacked that something peculiar and curious which she wanted, had she not felt as she did about me.

But I may be confused between what I knew then and what I know now. It may be that I did not understand it all so well, then--I forget--I cannot recall my actual state of mind. I give less importance to my preoccupation with Philibert than I should do, and lay too much emphasis on Bianca, because you see, I have got over Philibert, the hurt he did me is long since past and I no longer care about it, but from Bianca--I have never recovered. She never let me go--she never finished with me. It wasn’t just one thing--it was a series of things stretching over years, a continual coming back. You see--in the last analysis it was because of me that she ran away with Philibert, broke Fan’s heart and laid schemes for corrupting Jinny--and these things took fifteen years to accomplish. There was war between us for fifteen years.

The story of my life is the story of my duel with Bianca. Other people played a part, other feelings absorbed me for long periods, other relationships endured, but my relationship to Bianca was the long strong rope that hanged me. You will see how it was.

Why did she go on with it? I don’t know. Unless it was that I never gave in. Had I collapsed after Philibert left me, she might have been satisfied--and satisfied, she would have lost interest in me--and I should have been saved.

II

It is very difficult for me to recall my state of mind during the days that followed Philibert’s going off with her.

I’ve an idea that I was in a kind of stupor, not much noticing anything. I must have given orders that no one was to be admitted, for I learned afterwards that Claire and your mother both called, and a number of other relatives. I think I remained in my room for a day or two lying on the bed with my clothes on and refusing to open the door to my maid. It was Jinny who roused me. The servants were frightened. The nurse brought her down and she pounded on the door with her little fists till I opened it, but when she saw me she gave a shriek and ran away from me and hid in her nurse’s petticoats. That brought me to my senses, my child’s fear and the servants’ faces. I had a bath and something to eat. They brought me my letters obsequiously, and with furtive curiosity. I could hear the servants hanging about whispering. I imagined them talking, talking, endlessly talking it over downstairs. They were strangers to me, Philibert’s servants, servants of that great, horrible house that I disliked. I had no reason to stay there now. Nothing kept me--I would go home to St. Mary’s Plains.

I started a letter to my Aunt Patience, what was I to say to her? “My husband has run away with another woman. He never loved me. My mother married me to him for her own purposes. Now that she is dead there is no more reason to go on with this horrible farce. I am coming home.” Something of that kind? No, I couldn’t. I stared at the words I had written--“My dearest Aunt Patty.” I seemed to see her sitting off there, at the end of that great distance, adjusting her spectacles, opening my letter with expectant fingers. I saw the shabby room, the sunlight on the worn carpet, the littered writing desk, the piles of books, the stuffed birds in their glass cases. I saw my aunt an old woman, facing old age alone, with equanimity, following year after year the pursuit of knowledge, not afraid of time, not oppressed by solitude, going up to bed night after night in the empty house and kneeling down in her flannel dressing-gown beside her narrow white counterpane to pray to God, and remembering me always, never forgetting me, never leaving me alone.

Once she had said, “When you’re in a hole, Jane, and don’t know what to do, you can always do the thing you hate doing most and you’ll probably not be far wrong.”

Looking out of the window I became aware of Paris and I thought of those words. Paris! There it was streaming by, to the races. Was it aware of what had happened to me? I wondered. Did people know that Bianca and Philibert had run away together like a couple of actors, like a pair of quite common people? I imagined society agog with the scandal. I saw them gloating pitying. I heard women saying--“_Cette pauvre femme, elle était vraiment trop bête._” It seemed to me that every one in the street must be looking up at my windows with curiosity and derision. They were invading my privacy, pulling off from me the last decent covering of my dignity. Well, why sit there and bear it? Why suffer public humiliation? My eyes fell on my engagement book. I observed that Philibert and I were due for dinner that night at your Aunt Clothilde’s. I rang for my maid and told her to telephone _Madame la Duchesse_ and say that although Monsieur, having been called out of town, would not be able to present himself at her dinner, I would come with pleasure, as had been arranged. My face in the glass seemed much as usual. I had done all my weeping with you, my poor Blaise, three nights before. Having made up my mind to go out I now experienced a certain relief. The coiffeur was summoned and the manicurist. Aunt Clo’s dinners were very special affairs, so I chose a nice dress, white, and put on an extra rope of pearls. As you know, my appearance created something of a sensation. I saw that at once. They had thought me already dead and buried, and were gossiping as I suspected, over my remains. My business for the moment was to show them that I was alive.

Ah, but how dreary and trivial it all seems now. Why? Why? What earthly difference did it make what they said or thought? But I am telling you about it, just as it was. I wanted, I needed desperately at that moment, the sense of my own dignity. It was all I had left. So I went out to that dinner party and defended it.

Aunt Clo was nice. She was pleased with me and put me opposite her. It was a vatican dinner, semi-political. I had, I remember, the Italian Ambassador on my right and the Foreign Minister on my left. Your aunt was between the Archbishop and the Duc de B---- recently arrived from Rome. The talk was brilliant, I believe. I heard it in a daze, but managed to keep my end up somehow. Clémentine was there, at her best, in wonderful form. She must have known all about Philibert, for she came up to me after dinner and said--“Blaise de Joigny is my great friend. You must come to see me. We have much in common.” Our friendship dates from that night.

But when I reached home I felt more tired than I had thought it possible to be. I went up to the nursery. Jinny was asleep in her cot, hugging a white woolly dog. I knelt beside her and sent out my spirit in search of God, but I did not find Him. I could not pray. I heard my baby’s breathing, blissful, trustful breathing. I knelt listening. She was so small and sweet. Above her was an immense blackness. She made now and then happy little sounds in her sleep, and lying there so still I saw her moving on and on, invisibly, into the future to the ticking of the nursery clock, carried along as she lay there on the current of life, life that was an enormous dupery, an ugliness and a lie.

The days passed, separate and distinct, moving in a procession, each one to be watched and endured separately, moving by their own volition, taking no account of me, having nothing to do with me, answerable to some mysterious power that started each one rolling like a bead dropped from the end of a string, and in each one, as in a crystal, I saw the pageant of Paris revolving, but I was outside, drifting in empty space.

The longing to get away from it all was unbearable. I would go--I would go--I must go--Patience Forbes was the only person in the world who could help me--and yet I went on working out my idea that took me about among people, and you, dear Blaise, went with me. Your attitude was of a delicacy rare even in your world of delicate adjustments and sympathies. You understood, you constituted yourself my escort. Do you remember those days, how we went from one place to another, luncheons, dinners, private views, official receptions, and how we tacitly agreed on just the amount we were bound to do for our purpose? I scarcely realized at the time all that it meant for you to do this, and how the family would resent your attitude. I know now that they never quite trusted you after this. As I remember we talked nothing over and did not, I think, mention Philibert save once, when I asked you if you knew where he was. You did know, of course. Every one knew, I suppose, except myself. They had been seen, those two, boarding the Simplon express. They were in Venice, you told me, I had wanted to know for convenience. Having adopted a line, it seemed best to follow it consistently. One was to assume that my husband had gone away for a holiday. I was there to make his excuses to suffering hostesses deprived of his society. The note to be struck was light and commonplace, as if his absence were like any other of his many past absences. The pretence deceived no one, but then the consistent lying made for decency. I was marking time. It was particularly difficult because I was not acting in accord with my nature. Had I been natural at that time I should have been horrible; I should have smashed things. But I was not behaving like myself. I see now what it was; I was behaving like one of you, behaving as Claire, for instance, would have behaved in my place. I was adopting your methods and your standards. Not to give myself away, not to let any one suspect what I was feeling and thinking, not to make a false step, not to make above all a public fuss, that seems to have been my idea. To preserve appearances as beautifully as possible, that was what you and I were working at, as we trailed drearily round from one place to another saying suave things with smooth faces.

And there was another influence working on me, even more subtle and far more pervasive. You will smile, perhaps, when I tell you that my quiet behaviour came from looking every day across the Place de la Concorde to the austere and reserved façade of the Madeleine, or across a silver distance of pale houses to the far alabaster pinnacle of the Sacré Coeur high above the city, but it was so. Paris exercises upon its inhabitants a fine discipline of taste. Those who love it change unconsciously. The long, wide, symmetrical avenues, the formal gardens, with their slim fountains, single waving sprays of crystal water, the calm façades of long rows of narrow, uniform houses, palest yellow in sunlight, pearl white towards evening, these things have an effect upon one’s manners that is imperceptible and profound. They spelt to me harmony and restraint and Plato’s idea of beauty. My high falsity was at the best only less futile than a good, noisy bout of hysterics. What comforted me in these hours of doubt was that I knew you were no more certain than I. You did not represent your family. You were neither a go-between nor a spy nor a jailor, you were a friend. Positively I believe there were moments when you wanted me to break out, break away, throw caution and carefulness to the winds. Sometimes there was so much compassion in your face that I almost cried out to you not to care so much. I wanted to warn you that it was only for the moment that I was keeping my head up, that I wouldn’t be able and didn’t intend to go on with it indefinitely and that the thought behind all my smooth social words was; “He has gone for ever. Soon I’ll be free to say so.”

I did really believe Philibert had left me for good. It never occurred to me that he would ever come back, and that belief was in a way my refuge. I was rid of them both; Bianca, I told myself, would be satisfied now and would leave me alone. She would carry on her mischief elsewhere, not in my life. My life was, I believed, my own, separated for always from hers and from Philibert.

Then one day Fan turned up. She came in jauntily, her head in the air, as if nothing had happened. She looked very smart, her hat set at a rakish angle, her short, pleated skirt flippant above her neat ankles. From across the room she called out “Well,--Jane, we’ve married a nice pair of men. Here’s Philibert’s skipped and I’ve had to send Ivanoff packing. He’d taken to beating me, I’m black and blue all over. Some people like it--I don’t.” She gave me a peck on the cheek. “Poor old Jane, you’re taking it hard, I suppose.” She turned back the sleeve of her dress. Her arm had welts on it. “You should see my back.” I shuddered, but at sight of my emotion she twitched away from me with a nervous laugh. “Between my Slav and your Frenchman I don’t know that there’s much to choose. God, if it were only an occasional beating I shouldn’t mind.” She did a waltz step across the room, twirled round on her tiny feet, lit a cigarette standing on tiptoe, and collapsed into a chair in a spasm of coughing.

“I had it out with Ivanoff, my dear, about you, and I know all about it--just the exact sums you gave him for me, bless your baby heart, and everything. At first I doubted you. I was a fool. I’m sorry. Unfortunately I found out other things. There are other women in the world who don’t love me at all, but who pay for my shoes. Do you hear? Do you get what I mean? I find I’ve been paying my bills with their money. What do you say to that? I ask you simply. And we’re on the streets now--at least he’s gone--I’m staying with Madeleine de Greux, and the bailiffs have got our furniture.” And she went off into a wild scream of laughter. It was incredibly painful. She sat there as neat and smart as a pin. Her small cocked hat on one side of her head, her pretty little legs crossed, one high-heeled patent leather slipper dangling in the air, the other tapping the floor, she puffed smoke through her little tilted nose and looked at me desperately out of her hard, level eyes, while she yelled with laughter just as if some one were tickling her till she screamed with pain.

I went to my desk and got out my cheque book. “Let’s pay off the furniture first,” I said as prosaically as I could, but she jumped up irritably.

“God! Jane, what a fool you are. Put that cheque book away. Do you think I’d touch another penny of yours? There--don’t be hurt. Of course I would if I needed it, but what good will money do? I can’t go and hunt out Ivo’s mistresses and pay them back, can I? Oh, God! Oh, God! Oh, God!--I did like him. Men are devils. Even now I’m worried about him. I imagine him locked up somewhere or dead drunk in the gutter lying out in the dark--whereas he’s probably at Monte having a high old time. By the way, your French family is in a great state about you. Claire says their position as regards you is very delicate. I suppose it is. They don’t know whether to come here or to leave you alone. They wonder what you’re going to do. They’re frightfully cut up about Fifi, and they’re afraid you’ll do something final like getting a divorce.”

“Well, my dear, that’s just what I do think of doing.”

“I see.” She ruminated, chewing her cigarette that had gone out. “They’ll never forgive you if you do.”

“I suppose not, but I don’t see that that matters.”

“Oh, but it does. They’re so perfectly charming. They’d make Paris impossible for you.”

“That sounds charming, I must say.”

“Don’t be stupid, Jane. You know what I mean. You know how clever they are. They’re the most attractive people on earth. But if you set them against you, the whole clan, you’ll find life here very different.”

“I don’t propose to live here.”

“Where then?”

“In St. Mary’s Plains.”

“Heaven help you, my poor misguided lamb.”

“I’m homesick,” I persisted obstinately.

“Of course, for the moment, because you’re unhappy.”

“No, not only because I’m unhappy. I like the Grey House. I belong there. It’s quiet, it’s safe, it’s real, it’s the place I know best in the world.”

“Nonsense. It’s a dingy little shanty.”

“You can call it names if you like. I don’t care what you say. I’m going back there.”

“For good?”

“I don’t know--perhaps.”

“Well, you won’t stay, so you’d better not risk it.”

“Risk what?”

“Having to eat humble pie and come back to be forgiven.”

It was my turn to get up with a fling of exasperation and walk about. She followed me with her bright, piercing gaze.

“Think a little, Jane. Use your brains, if you can. Think of the difference between your life here and your life at home in that Godforsaken hole of St. Mary’s Plains. Look at this room. Look out of the window and remember. Don’t I remember? Wooden sidewalks with weeds growing between the boards, boys playing marbles in the street, women hanging out their washing in backyards, Sunday clothes, oh, those best Sunday clothes, revival meetings, Moody and Sankey in tents on the lake shore, picnics, bicycle rides, dances at the Country Club, freckled youths kissing you on the verandah, great news--Ethel Barrymore is coming in her new play that’s been running a year in New York. Excursions on the lake, fifty cents a round trip and soft drinks, sarsaparilla, ginger ale, buggy rides, shopping down town, talking to old women--cats who gossip about somebody’s new red silk petticoat, too flighty, indecent. All going to church and shouting ‘Hallaleluja’ and eating blueberry pie afterwards till their mouths are all black inside.”

“Well,” I said. She wriggled about as if sitting on pins.

“You want to give up Paris, this house, your position here, for that? You’ve got Europe at your feet. You’ve only got to sit tight and every one in Paris will be on your side. Fifi will come back and be as good as gold. You’ll be able to do what you like with him after this.”

I stopped her.

“So you think I’d take Philibert back?”

“Yes, I do. We all do.”

“And begin again living together, after this?”

“Yep.”

“You don’t find it appalling even to think of--?”

“No, merely a little uncomfortable to begin with.”

“You take my breath away.”

She eyed me calmly. “My dear Jane, don’t be the high tragedian. All marriages are like that. How many women do we know, do you suppose, whose husbands haven’t had little vacations--?”

“If you don’t mind we won’t talk about it. Other women’s marriages are nothing to me.”

She shrugged her shoulders and lit another cigarette, and for a time we were silent. I looked at her. She seemed to me terrible, hard as nails and more cynical than any one, and yet she was my friend. Nothing, I knew then as I watched her, nothing that she could say or do would alter that fact. She belonged to me. What she felt would always affect me. In some absurd way I was responsible for her. Our childhood and its meagre austere background, with all that she repudiated, held us together.

Presently she began again. “Now listen to me, Jane. Philibert may be a brute, but he’s done a lot for you. He has given you a very great position. You were rich but he knew how to make your money tell. There’s not a house in the world like yours. I don’t mean only the furniture. Your parties are beyond everything. You’re more _recherchée_ than any woman in Paris. You can pick and choose from all the great people of the world, the men with brains. Lord! how you could amuse yourself if you wanted to. I only wish I had your chance. Do you think I’d let my husband’s infidelity spoil my life? I’d be no such fool. I might not like it, but I’d make up my mind to forget it. Well, here you are and you want to go back and crawl into that little hole in a prairie and stifle there.”

“Yes, I do.”

“But the people there--” she almost screamed.

“I don’t know about the people. They may not be what you call amusing, but they’re at any rate natural, common or garden human beings, and anyhow if there weren’t another soul there’s Aunt Patty; she’s the finest woman in the world, and I adore her.”

Fan looked at me in amazement.

“I’d die!” she gasped on a long, wailing breath. We were again silent, then, while the image of Aunt Patience took shape before us, gaunt, with her big bones showing under her limp, black clothes, worn, strong, knotted hands, crooked humourous face, weather-beaten like a peasant’s, straggling thin, grey hair. And suddenly I saw her as she appeared to Fan, a shabby old maid in frumpy clothes, talking with a nasal twang, saying things like Mark Twain, worshipping Huxley and Daniel Webster and Abraham Lincoln, a child woman of stern moral principles, unaware of the existence of such life as ours, displeased and angry at our doings, hurt deeply by our words and our laughter. I imagined her in Paris, stalking down the Rue de la Paix like a pilgrim from the Caucasus, a figure of grotesque grandeur disturbing the merry frivolous traffic, sublime, terrible spectre of stark simplicity, utterly out of her element in our world. And I was angry with Fan for evoking such an image. I turned away from it in distress, ashamed.

“You’ve already gone too far,” she said impishly. “You can’t get back. You’re spoiled for your Aunt Patience.”

“We’ll see,” I muttered. My suspicions were suddenly roused by a look in her little squirrel face.

“You’ve been talking to Claire,” I said.

“Well, what if I have?”

“She sent you.”

“Yes, she did; but I was coming, anyway.”

“I don’t believe you. You hate my being unhappy, you were worried, but you’d have avoided coming if you could. The fact that we’ve always been friends and that you can’t help it is a nuisance to you. Well, tell me, what is Claire’s point of view?”

“She thinks in some measure that it’s your fault. She says Fifi has behaved very badly, but that if you’d been clever he wouldn’t have done anything sensational, anything to make a scandal.”

“I see.”

“She’s very unhappy about it all. She says it’s making her mother ill. She says that if it were not for her mother it would not matter so much, but that if you divorce Philibert it will kill her.”

“Why doesn’t Claire come herself and tell me all this?”

“She doesn’t dare. She says you don’t like her.”

“That, my dear, is funny. I’ve adored her for years and she’s consistently snubbed me.”

“Well, anyway, you’re so different, she feels you wouldn’t understand. You see, she puts up with a good deal herself.”

“I know. Perhaps I understand more than she thinks I do.”

“She’s very unhappy in her marriage, too, but she doesn’t make a fuss about it. She doesn’t expect the impossible.”

“Whereas I do?”

“Well, yes. Between you and me and the lamp-post I think you do.”

“I only ask to be allowed to save Geneviève from a fate like my own.”

“Oh, my dear, if you think they’ll let you have Geneviève--”

“What do you mean?”

“A man always has rights over his child in this country, whatever the facts against him.”

“You suggest that the law wouldn’t give me my own child?”

“It wouldn’t, not the French law.”

“Well, we’ll see about that, too.”

“Jane, you’re terrible.”

“Am I?”

“Yes, you frighten me.”

“I’m sorry.”

“What shall I say to them?”

“To whom?”

“Claire, Madame de Joigny, your Aunt Clothilde, all of them.”

“Say nothing. Why should you serve them? Why should you side with them against me? Weren’t you mine years before you ever saw one of them? What’s become of our friendship? What’s become of your loyalty? You’ve sold yourself, you’re not what you used to be, you’d do anything now for a pleasant life. Because they’re attractive and have attractive manners and make pretty speeches you’d do anything for them. What good does it all do you? You’re ill, you’re worn to a frazzle, your husband has been dragging you down, down, into a darkness, queer, unimaginable, shameful, and you can’t get loose. You just dance about in the blackness. Your feet stick in the mud. Having a good time somehow, anything for a good time. Coughing yourself to pieces, raging fever on you, your heart sick with distrust, restless, evasive, evading issues, you go on dancing, laughing, having a good time. Why don’t you pull yourself together? Why won’t you let me help you? I love you. I love you much better than Claire does. If your husband were put in prison what would Claire do, do you think?”

But Fan had grown deadly pale. I stopped, horrified. She was leaning against the mantelpiece, spitting into her handkerchief: there was blood on it.

That evening when I had taken her back to Madeleine de Greux’s--for she refused to stay with me--and we had put her to bed, she clung to me weakly. Her eyes closed. “It’s all true, what you said, Jane,” she gasped, “but I can’t help it, I can’t stop. If I stopped amusing myself I’d die.”

“But, my darling, let me get you well first, let me take you somewhere.”

“Perhaps, later,” she whispered, “if you don’t go to America. Perhaps we might try Switzerland, but not where there are sick people.” She shuddered. “I hate sickness so, and unhappiness. It’s so ugly. Being gay is beautiful. It makes things look beautiful. Ivanoff is a devil, but you’ll admit he was beautiful. I like attractive brutes better than clumsy saints. So do you, that’s why you married Philibert, just because he was so attractive. No one could be so attractive when he tried. Admit it, he gave you wonderful hours, you know he did. Wasn’t that something? What’s the use of being good if you’re deadly dull? Good men aren’t our kind, my dear. They’d bore us to death. Philibert made you happy for a time, wonderfully, because he knew how. What more do you want? Don’t be a fool. Take it all as it comes. Make an arrangement with him--you owe him something. I’ll be all right in a day or so. Let me know what you decide. Americans are hipped on their ideals. All that’s no use. French people know what’s what. Claire would love you if you gave her a chance. They are all ready to be fond of you, and they’re delicious people. Don’t be a fool. There, leave me now. We were idiots to quarrel. You have a nasty temper, my poor Jane, and your heart’s too big for this world. You’ll come an awful cropper if you’re not careful.”

III

Philibert’s family had shown up to this point, a remarkable restraint. As long as I went about as if nothing had happened, they left me alone, but after my scene with Fan I allowed myself a revulsion of feeling. I stopped going out. I shut myself up and sent for my lawyer. Philibert had been gone two months. I saw no reason to put off any longer, the action that I was determined on; I would start divorce proceedings, leave things in professional hands and go home. What else could I do?

July was drawing to a close. The season was ending in a languid dribble of belated garden parties. Fan, with a characteristic spurt of energy, had recovered and gone off to the Austrian Tyrol with the de Greux, leaving me with a last bit of reiterated advice about not being a fool. I observed that I had no place to go, and nothing to do. Biarritz, Trouville, Dinard, would mean carrying on the sickening pretence under an even closer scrutiny than in Paris. The Château de Ste. Clothilde had no charms for me now. I had liked the place, but Philibert had spoiled it with his endless improvements. It was now, his creation stamped with him. Sitting alone in my room at the top of the house with the shabby relics of the Grey House, I thought of him as he had been there in the country, strutting about directing his army of workmen, cutting down trees, pulling up whole lawns to replace them with gravelled terraces, and sinking into the reluctant earth marble basins for the lovely vagrant waters of the park. He had always professed to be the enemy of nature. It was true. What he called--“_Les bêtises de la nature_,” filled him with disgust. Spreading trees and green fields dotted with buttercups and bubbling streams tumbling through thickets got on his nerves. “_Regardez donc le laissez-aller de tout cela_,” he would cry. “How ugly it is. How stupid. It has no form, no design.” Clumps of trees in a meadow he would liken to pimples on hairy faces. He called grass the hair of the earth, and couldn’t endure it unless it was close cut. He never saw a stream of water without wanting to use it up in elaborate fountains. Gardens he regarded as “salons” in the open air. One should use the shrubs and trees and flowers as one used silks and brocades in an interior. Everything in a garden must be “_voulu_.” Nothing must be left to go its own way, not a vine, not a rosebush, not a tree should be allowed a movement of its own. Nature must be bound and twisted into a work of art. “Ah,” he would exclaim, “how it amuses me to torture nature.” You know what he did. The result was very fine of its kind, certainly very grandiose. He would lead people out on the terrace and, standing a minute, a shiny dapper little manikin, five foot four in high heels above that great design of gravel walks and fountains and squares of water, with their little parquets of green grass closed in by hedges, like a series of drawing-rooms, he would sparkle with enthusiasm. “You see,” he would say, “what I have done, you see how these gardens _s’accrochent au château_, how it is all a part of the house. The château could not exist without the garden, nor the garden without the château. One would have no sense without the other. Before I restored the grounds and elaborated on the old designs of Lenôtre, the house was horrible.” He had placed complicated machinery under his fountains that made the waters when they were in play take a dozen varied successive shapes. Nothing amused him more than watching all those waters playing, twisting, turning, tracing strange designs in the sunlight, designs that he himself had imagined. It gave him a peculiar joy to see his own idea produced in crystal drops of water. He had worked in sunlight and limpid flowing water as a painter works in colours, and had in a way produced for himself the illusion of the miraculous.

He couldn’t understand why I suffered when he had all those magnificent trees uprooted and when later on I complained that there was no shade anywhere and no place to lie down with a book: “But, my poor child, you’ve your bed for that, or your ‘_chaise longue_.’ This garden is neither a bedroom nor a boudoir, it is a ‘_salle de fêtes_’.”

I remembered all this. Certainly for many reasons Ste. Clothilde was out of the question. I would take Jinny home with me to St. Mary’s Plains. The moment had come. A strange excitement came over me as I at last wrote out the cablegram to Patience Forbes announcing our sailing on the first of August. On the same day I had a talk with my solicitor. _Maître_ Baudoin was a jaded, dry man, I believe honest, and rather dull. He was eager for a holiday and very bored, I could see, at the idea of being kept in town. He gave me little sympathy.

I wished to divorce my husband. That might or might not be possible. It depended, of course, to a certain extent, to a limited extent, on whether I had sufficient grounds, and whether _Monsieur le Marquis_ contested the suit. I intimated briefly that I believed I had sufficient grounds. He eyed me gravely through half-shut deferential and sleepy eyes. Did I think my husband would defend the suit, because if he did, no matter what my grounds were, the case might last five years. He told me this as a matter of conscience. Such a case would be lucrative to him, of course, but it might prove fatiguing to the parties more directly concerned. Five years? Yes, or even ten. That was the way in France. A divorce against a man who fought it was very difficult to obtain, and of course the Church did not recognize it. That was not his affair save in so far as if I had the intention of re-marrying, such a marriage would of necessity be considered bigamous by all good Catholics. I had, I said, no intention of marrying a second time. He seemed at that rather mystified. I desired, then, nothing more than legal separation? That was much simpler. It was all a question of property. Was there a settlement? He supposed I wished “_séparation des biens_.” I told him that I had no wish to leave _Monsieur de Joigny_ in financial difficulties and that that question might be left until later, but he proved obstinate and kept on talking on the same subject till my head ached. Finally I gathered that he was suggesting as delicately as he could that Philibert might be bribed. “But I can’t settle on him a large sum,” I objected wearily, “the fortune is tied up for my daughter.”

“Ah, a trust?”

“Yes.”

“It all goes to your child on your death?”

“Yes, to my children or child, by my father’s will.”

“I see. She becomes, then, the important factor.”

“What do you mean?”

“You would lose her.”

“Why?”

“The law courts would not deprive her father of her custody.”

“But if he doesn’t care for her?”

“Are you sure he doesn’t?”

“He has left her.”

“For a time, perhaps, but she is his, and if, which would be most unnatural, he did not care for her, he might still care for what she represented.”

It was on the tip of my tongue to say that he cared for nothing but his mistress, but I left the vulgar words unspoken. After all, I was not sure that Philibert did not care for Geneviève. His moods of a doting father might be genuine. He might indeed fight for her. My will hardened as I wearily dismissed the tiresome discouraging man of law. It was all more complicated than I had thought.

He had scarcely got out of the house before it was invaded by relatives. With a startling promptitude, they bore down on me. They must have had spies in the house. My secretary must have telephoned the alarm, or the Governess or the Butler, any one, or all of the staff may have been keeping them informed. In any case, there they were, miraculously ushered into my presence without warning one by one, or two by two, or in groups, aunts, uncles, cousins, first, second, third cousins, cousins by marriage once removed, some of them people whom I scarcely knew, strange old women in wigs with withered faces and ragged feather boas, unearthed for the occasion out of their old grand sealed houses; shrivelled old men with stiff knees and watery eyes; it would have seemed funny, had my nerves not been on edge, had their visits not appeared to me so exceedingly misplaced. I soon found that no hinting on my part would make them take this view. They meant business. They were the family. They were acting for the family and as a family. Some of them constituted that sacred thing the “_conseil de famille_” and they were acting in accordance with the rights and duties of a French family in harmony with and under the protection of the law of the French state. With correct and concise politeness they gave me to understand that I was not free to do as I liked, that I was one of them, bound as they were bound, and that if I chose to go against their will, and defy my obligations, then I would do so at my own peril and at the cost of what I held most dear. I saw what they were driving at. They meant to keep Jinny whatever happened. If I declared war, I would lose my child.

I put it brutally. They didn’t. They were charming. They beat round the bush. They asked after my health. They drank tea and smoked cigarettes and patted Jinny’s head and said charming things to her and gave her bonbons but they made their meaning clear and the more diplomatic they were, the angrier I became.

This kind of thing went on for three days. I remained obdurate. I refused to commit myself, but gradually I was becoming frightened. What frightened me was that I saw that they all, every one of them, even those that I had thought most human, even your Aunt Alice who was a saint and your Uncle Stanislas all sided with Philibert, all stood solid behind him, all would stick to him no matter what he did, before the world and against the foreigner who threatened the close fabric of their community; and I took it as a sinister portent that those of the immediate family, whom I knew best, your mother and Claire and Aunt Clothilde, stayed away. In despair I went to Aunt Clothilde. What, I asked her, did it all mean? She gave me no comfort. It meant simply that things were so in France. French families were like that. They clung together, and they did not admit divorce. If I tried to divorce Philibert I would fail and would in the attempt lose my child. Philibert, of course, was a rascal, but what would you, I ought to have known it from the beginning. American women thought too much of themselves. There was no modesty in the way I was behaving. Why should I suppose that the whole scheme of the social state should be upset because my husband liked another woman better than he did me? She liked me, of course she liked me--for that reason she had refused to take part in the family’s councils of war. But she was disappointed in me, she had thought I had pluck. Here I was, behaving like a fish wife who has been knocked into the gutter, screaming for my rights, for vengeance. I had better go home and say my prayers. I went, and as if in answer to the dreadful old woman’s bidding found a bishop in the drawing-room. My nerves by that time were in such a state that the suave and polished prelate soon had me in tears. He mistook them for tears of repentance. He talked a long time about the consolation of religion and the comfort of confession and rejoiced to find that I was less inimical to the benign influence of Rome, than he had thought. I scarcely heard what he said, but his fine ivory face and glowing eyes and thin set mouth, gave me a feeling of uncanny power. I remembered that I belonged to his Church, that I had been solemnly married at the High Altar of Rome, that there I had taken vows, had professed beliefs, and I felt a sudden superstitious terror. What if it were true, their truth? What could they do to me, these mysterious ministers of the Pope? What could they not do? In my fever, I saw myself tracked to St. Mary’s Plains, followed up the steps of the Grey House by sallow figures in black cassocks, and suffering, labouring for the rest of my days, under the mysterious blight of an ecclesiastical curse.

When one lives in a country that is not one’s own, among strange people whom one knows only superficially, surrounded by customs and conventions that one does not understand, one finds it difficult to decide moral issues. I felt bewildered and at a loss. It still seemed to me at moments inevitable and right to divorce Philibert. At other moments I felt less sure. The disapproval of the organized compact community was having its effect. The antagonism of the family acted on me with incessant pressure, however obstinately I repeated to myself the words “I don’t care.” I did care. I was alone. I could not even be certain that my Aunt Patience would approve. She might say in her terse way, “Quite right, Jane. He’s forfeited your respect, get rid of him,” or she might say, “You married him before God, you can’t undo that,” I did not know what she would say. And the problem of Geneviève tortured me. The fear of losing her if I divorced her father was no greater than the fear of seeing her gradually slipping from me as the years passed, if I remained his wife. No one knew better than I how charming he could be if he chose. I watched him in anticipation stealing her heart from me, turning her against her own mother. I saw her becoming more and more like him, becoming his pupil, his work of art. Philibert made things his own so easily. He had a genius for conquest. Everything that he touched became his. How different from me! There was nothing in Philibert’s house that belonged to me, except the few sticks of furniture that I had hidden away in that room upstairs. The lovely things in the great rooms troubled me. They affected my nerves as if a chorus of small muffled voices were calling out to me in strange tongues that I could not understand. I realized their beauty, but was conscious of not appreciating them as they deserved. There was no sympathy between us. They affected me but I did not affect them. I could never make them look as if they were a part of my life. I was loath to handle them, but no amount of touching with my fingers would have given them a familiar look; the tables and chairs and tapestries remained there around me, enigmatic, permanent, unresponsive. My life spent itself, throbbing out among them, beating against their calm, smooth surfaces without reaching them. There was no trace in that house of the tumult of my own life. It continued cold, inexorable and strange.

It remained for your mother to seek me out in my loneliness and show me what I should do. I thought at the time that I recognized her words as words of truth. I do not know now whether I was right or wrong.

Claire never came. She sent her husband instead, not so much as a messenger, more as an object lesson, a mute reminder--I caught her idea--I was to look at him and realize what she was putting up with and draw from the spectacle of his awfulness the moral. Unexpectedly, his awfulness, appealed to me. There was something about this keen little stolid French bounder that was a relief. His oily head, his fat brown face, his monstrous nose and little bright beady eyes, these unattractive things made up a hard compact entity. He was solid and complete, round paunch, tight trousers, plump hands fingering a gold watch chain, smell of bayrum and soap, aura of success, of materialism, of industrial jubilance and all the rest of it. But he showed me for the first time that day something more, himself smarting under his thick skin with the innumerable de Joigny slights stinging him, controlled enough not to let on, determined to get out of them in exchange what they could give him, but not counting it much, a shrewd downright kind little rascal, with a good old middle-class self-respect strong in him, strong enough to make him feel himself their superior.

It didn’t take him long to make his point. He talked quickly and neatly.

Claire was unwell, she had sent him to add his voice to the family howl. Claire never howled. When there was trouble, she withdrew. It wasn’t her _genre_, to mix herself up in a fuss. Well--he wasn’t at all sure that he had anything to say. Firstly because, after all, it was none of his business. He wasn’t a member of the de Joigny family and never would be. They had made that perfectly clear, years ago. So why should he interfere?

I smiled. “Why indeed?” He smiled back, his hands crossed on his stomach; his smile took a cynically humorous curve.

“If on the other hand, Madame, my sister-in-law, you want an outsider’s opinion, it is at your disposal.”

“Two outsiders, confabing together,” I ventured.

“No,” he spoke abruptly, in a light sharp staccato, a nasal voice, not unpleasant, the voice of the phenomenally intelligent French bourgeoisie. “You are not as I am. You are a woman. They won’t let you in--but they won’t let you out. You belong to them. I don’t--beside I am of their people. I am French--I have my own backing. They don’t like what I represent but they are obliged to admit its importance. It is the backbone of France that I represent, the bread they eat, the stones they walk on, the nation they ground under their heels in the old days. They stamp on me now, but only in play, only to save their faces--not seriously--they can’t. You, Madame, are different. You are a foreigner, and ‘_sans défense_.’ _La famille de Joigny_ have a contempt for foreigners. Your protectors are in America. They snap their fingers at them. You are helpless--”

It was true. Well then?

He eyed me, humorously. “It depends on what you want out of them. I take it they can’t give you much of anything. You didn’t marry one of them, as I did, to ameliorate your situation in society. Putting aside the charm of the son and daughter, why did we do it? I did it as a bit of business. For me it was ‘_une affaire_--’ how it turned out is neither here nor there. I can look after myself. For you it is different, I repeat you are helpless. They are too many for you.” He chuckled good-naturedly.

Again it was true; I assented meekly.

“Ah ha--_Voilà_, you see it. Then, my advice is--‘_Filez_’--get out.”

“And Geneviève?”

“Bribe them.”

“You think--?”

He ruminated, his nose in the air--“Yes, I think--if you make it enough.” He laughed again, rose briskly, took up his hat, his cream-coloured gloves, his gold-headed cane. For an instant his bright little eyes scrutinized me--he seemed about to speak, his thick lips formed, I saw them there, grave words, a confidence perhaps, a lament, a plea for sympathy, I know not what. He didn’t speak them; he was very intelligent; he had a delicacy as fine as theirs, when he cared to show it. There was a nicer compliment to me in this clever little bounder’s attempting no understanding with me, than any I had received in many a long day.

He left with me a pleasant feeling of my own independence, he left me invigorated and more sane than I had been, but your mother wiped out the impression he had made, with one wave of her hand.

I remember the sight of her in my doorway. I was so little expecting her that I had a chance to see her quite clearly during one instant, before I realized who she was. A small black figure in a stiff little ugly black hat and short cape, a dumpy forlorn little figure of no grace or elegance, and a worn nervous face, out of which stared a pair of very bright determined dark eyes. She might have been a very hard-driven gentle woman, determined to brave insults and apply for the post of housekeeper. This in the flash before all that I knew of her covered her like a veil, and before she spoke.

I did not want to see her. I knew in an instant why she had come. I remember wondering if I could get out of the other door before she spoke, before I really looked at her, and all the time I was looking and she was looking, we were staring at each other.

I had always had a deep regard for her. The fact that she did not like me, made no difference. That was where Claire’s husband had fallen short in his putting of the case. He didn’t know that I cared for Madame de Joigny; he didn’t know that I wanted the family to love me, because I loved them. Now in your mother’s presence, I felt the immense disadvantage of this. She cared nothing for me and I was bound to give in to her. I knew I would give in. I knew that I was about to make one last attempt to win her. I tried to rouse myself. I recalled and went over in my mind the opinion I knew she had of me. I knew that physically I was repulsive to her. Often when I approached her, I had seen her shudder. She thought me _outrée_. Once she had said, “Why is it Jane, that you can never look like other people? Everything you put on becomes gorgeous and exaggerated. It is most unfortunate.” And she was afraid of my feelings, my violent enthusiasms and my deep longings. Oh, I knew, I knew quite well. Instinctively she felt my hot blood pounding in my veins--and recoiled from contact.

Most of all she hated me because of what I had done to Philibert. I had made him nouveau riche; I had made him ridiculous; I had made him unhappy, and worst of all, I had made him appear to her, cruel and vulgar. When he was unkind to me, she hated me for being the cause of his unkindness. You thought her love for Philibert a blind adoration but it was not blind. She understood him, she knew him to his bones, and she spent her life in shielding him from her own scrutiny. Her relief was in submitting herself to his charm. She delighted in him, but she hated his conduct. It seemed to her that he was a victim of what she most hated. She accused him in her own heart of being faithless to her faith, the faith of his ancestors. She saw on him the stains and distorting marks of the vulgar world that amused him, but she was continually falling in love with him and losing herself in his charm, seeking solace, suffering, being disappointed. I believe Philibert made your mother suffer more than he made me suffer, far, far more, for you see she couldn’t stop loving him, she could never be free from him. He was her own, her first-born, the child of her passionate youth. He was her self that she had projected beyond herself, he was her great adventure, he was the gauge she had thrown down at the feet of fate, and it took all her courage to face calmly the travesty he made of her miracle.

My existence, you see, added immeasurably to the difficulty of her task. If he had married Bianca, Bianca, she believed, would have kept him in order and would have presented him to her soothed eyes in the light of a gallant gentleman. In marrying me he committed a serious error in taste to begin with, and having married me he behaved to me like a brute, and this was almost more than she could bear. The interesting thing to notice was that though she suffered horribly she made no attempt to remedy matters, did not try, I mean, to help us, and never gave me even as much as a hint as to how I should wisely have treated him, but limited her energy to just bearing her mortification without giving a sign of it. It did not seem to her worth while interfering to try and put things right when they were bound to go wrong, but it did seem necessary to keep up the make-believe that they were not going wrong. Almost everything in the world was going wrong. One couldn’t face it. One must shut oneself up. One must ignore ugly facts.

Philibert’s going off with Bianca in that spectacular fashion did, I know, very deeply hurt your mother. The horror of it to her must have been unspeakable. Here, at last, was an ugly fact of monstrous proportions that she could not ignore. She was bound at last to do something. She saw her son disgraced, her name dragged through the divorce court, she heard her world echoing with the clanging noise of scandal. She felt around her the brutal heaving of the foundation of her life. In her little tufted silken drawing-room that reminded me always of the inside of a jewel case, she had sat listening, shivering with apprehension. News came to her of the runaways. They were in Bianca’s palace in Venice giving themselves up to curious orgies of pleasure. People told strange tales of their doings. They seemed to have gone mad. News came then from another quarter. I had consulted my solicitor. Claire was thoroughly frightened. Your mother did not hesitate then. She was old, she was tired, she was without hope or illusions. She saw her son as he was, and she saw Bianca at last as she was, and she believed that for her there was no happiness to be derived ever again from those two people. But she loved Philibert, she loved him with anger and contempt and a breaking heart, and she was determined to save him the last final ignominy, and so she put on her bonnet and came to me. And as I thought of these things I was drawn out of my chair toward her in spite of myself.

I begged her to be seated. I told her that I was touched and distressed by her coming to me, and that had she sent me word I would have gone to her. She smiled wanly with her old infinite sweetness. That smile was the most consummate bit of artistry I have ever beheld. It denied everything. It assumed everything. It fixed the pitch of our talk, it indicated a direction and a limit. It outlined before me the space in which I was to be allowed to move. It gave her the leading rôle in the little drama that was about to be played out between us, and it established her position once and for all as that of a great lady calling upon an awkward young woman. But I saw beyond her smile. I saw what she had been through, and was suffering. The combined play of her terrible reddened eyes and that lovely unreal smile impressed me profoundly.

For any other woman the beginning of such a conversation would have been difficult, but your mother, opened up the subject that lay before us with ease and delicacy. Her phrase was finely pointed. She used it as she might have used a silver knife to lift the edge of a box that contained something ugly.

“I do not know,” she said, “whether or not you have ever loved my son, but I have felt that his sudden departure must have seemed to you very shocking, so I have come to reassure you.”

I recoiled at this. It seemed to me that I was being attacked and that was the last thing I expected. I was startled and puzzled by those opening words. What difference did it make whether or not I had loved her son? For a moment I felt angry. After all it was he that had left me; why then, should I be accused? As for reassurance, I did not want any. This was no time for reassurance. An ugly spirit stirred in me. I was about to answer abruptly, when I saw that the purple-veined hand that lay across the table before me was trembling. It was animated by some painful agitation that shook it even resting as it did on that strong surface. The withered palm was rubbing and quivering against the polished wood, the worn finger tips were tapping spasmodically. My eyes smarted at the sight of it. I spoke gently.

“Yes, _belle-maman_, I thank you for coming.”

“Ah, my poor child--and the family--I hear the family has been at you.”

“They have been here.”

“You must not mind them. They do not understand. In our world women, you know, take things differently, they do not expect what you expect.”

There was a pause. What could I say? She seemed very reasonable and very kind. I had never felt her so near to me before.

When she spoke again it was even more simply. “I have had no news of Philibert,” she said sadly. “Have you?” The tone of her voice was intimate and more natural than I had ever heard it when addressed to me. It implied that we were both unfortunate together. I responded to it with a flicker of hope.

“No,” I replied, “I have no news, but I have reason to believe that he will not come back.”

“Ah,” she cried. “What makes you think that? But it is impossible.”

“No,” I continued, “it is not impossible. It is true. He gave me to understand that himself.”

I felt her watching me closely.

“You mean?” she breathed.

“I mean that I must now take measures to live my own life. It is impossible for me to live in his house any longer.”

It was then that she made one of her quick, characteristic mental turns.

“Yes,” she said. “It’s a monstrous house. I don’t wonder you detest it.”

I almost smiled, but I was determined to get to the point. “Dear _Belle-Mère_,” I insisted, “that is neither here nor there. What I mean is that I must be legally free from Philibert.” I hesitated, I saw her face whiten, but I pressed the point. “It is best for me to tell you that I have decided to divorce your son.”

I don’t know what effect I had expected and feared to produce. It may be that I thought she would break down or faint dead away, or something of that kind. She had seemed so frail that I had been really afraid of the effect of my words. But nothing of this sort happened. The blow I had dealt seemed to spend its force in the air. It glanced off and went shivering into the rich, cold atmosphere of the room.

“My dear,” she said, enunciating her words very precisely, “_on ne divorce pas dans notre monde_.” And she looked away from me, coolly taking in the room with its priceless objects as if summoning them to witness to the truth of her statement. She was right to look round that room. It was her room, not mine. It understood her, not me. She had called it a moment before a detestable house, but that made no difference. Its magnificence was to be made use of all the same. We were in the room that Philibert always referred to when he took people over the house as “_le salon de Madame de Joigny_,” or “_le boudoir de ma femme_.” It was the nicest room in the house. You remember it well, with its pearly grey boiseries fine as lace, its Frangonard panels, its green lacquer furniture, the three windows on the garden where a stone fountain lifted its fine sculptured figures from the lawn. The light in the room was silvery green and translucent as the light seen beneath the surface of clear water, and in that dim radiance the fine precious objects floated above the polished floor as if even the laws of gravitation had been circumvented in the fine enclosed space. The boiseries had been in the Trianon--you remember Philibert had procured them after much bargaining. They had been designed and executed for Madame de Montespan. Their perfect beauty constituted a document, a testimony to the marvellous taste and finished craftsmanship of an epoch. France, in all its delicate dignity, existed in that room. It is no wonder that your mother looked about her for moral support. The rest of the immense house might have belied her, here she could place her faith without hesitation. I opposed to it the profession of my own faith.

“In my country,” I said dully, for I was beginning to feel baffled and confused, “we are not afraid to admit errors, to put away the past and begin something new.”

“But this, my dear child, is your country,” she said more gently. “You are a Frenchwoman now.”

I smiled. “Do you really think so?” I asked her. She drew a sharp breath. “Ah, if you only were,” she cried softly, “you would know how impossible it is to do what you want to do, and how useless.”

My attention closed sullenly like a clamp on the words “impossible,” “useless.” I stared at the floor. Why impossible? Why useless? Why did I listen to this woman who did not love me, and who told me that my longing to live was useless? How was it she made me listen to her? Where was her advantage? She was certain and I was uncertain, that was it. I was not quite sure, but she was sure. Her definite idea was projected out at me and into me like a hook. It took hold of me. I felt myself wriggling on it, and I heard, through the confusion of my own ideas that seemed to buzz audibly in my head, your mother’s voice talking.

“You are young,” it said. “You come of a young people. You believe in miracles. You seek perfection on earth. Believe me, I am old and wise, ideals are all very well, but one must be practical about life. Philibert has behaved very badly. He has made a scandal, but you can remedy that and maintain your dignity by disregarding his escapade, or at any rate treating it as nothing more than an escapade. And such it is, nothing more, believe me. The acts of men are never anything more. _Mon Dieu_, if we took what they did seriously, where should we be, we women? We must take them for what they are. _Il le faut bien._ We must never count on them. We must count on ourselves.”

But I seemed gradually to lose track of her words. It was strange, but the sound of her voice was conveying a meaning more profound and more direct than her spoken phrases. The sound of her voice rang in my ears like a light, mournful, warning bell, high metallic, hollow and sweet. It was old, an old sound much older than the lips through which it issued. It seemed to come from a far distance, from the distant past. Hollow and sweet and measured, its monotony insisted on the fine tried truths of the past, it called up proud, faded images of old resignations and compromises and lost illusions, and sounded constantly the note of the persistent obstinacy of pride. The words “we women” reached me. I was a woman, she was a woman. We were together. There were men in the world and women. When one reduced things to their last simplicity all women were bound together in the same bundle, dealing with the same problem. She, the older woman, was wise, I was foolish; but we were sisters in disappointment, we were weak, we must be proud. We had both loved Philibert, but even I had never loved him as she loved him. And he had broken her heart. The dignity of our life depended on our pride, to hide our hurt, to make no sound, no complaint, to arrange silently to make things bearable, to influence men without their knowing it. Our advantage lay in our clairvoyance. We could see through them when they could not see into us beyond our skins. We were weak if we treated them as they treated us, but we were strong if we remained mysterious, mute, proud. The children were ours. Everything we did was for our children. Philibert was her child. She must remember, she could not forget, he was her son. If we destroyed the family we destroyed our children. Even when the men destroyed it we must hold it together. We must pretend, for our children. When the man was gone we must pretend he was still there. Truth and beauty and dignity lay behind the pretence. We must pretend obstinately. If we pretended well enough it became true. We must not endanger our children’s lives, anything but that.

Little Geneviève came dancing into my vision, her hair flying, her little skirts blowing, her toes dancing; a shadow fell on her, she stopped her gay jumping about. She was all at once pale. Her eyes gazed at me reproachfully, mournful eyes of a child, suffering. Something about her was wrong, twisted, maimed. I shuddered. Your mother’s voice was still going on. The words she spoke were concise, delicate little pieces of sound strung together close like beads, they made a long, pale, shining chain that reached from the beginning of time out into the future. Over and over again I heard the same words. It seemed to me that she was endlessly repeating the same thing as if it were a bit of magic, of hoodoo. I wondered if she were hypnotizing me. Women must pretend--women, the protectors--the strong foundation--the family the basis of life. Women must keep the family intact. If we destroyed the family we destroyed our children--Philibert her child--Geneviève my child.

I looked up and saw your mother as I had never seen her before--she was bare--she was stark naked--she was fighting for her child, for her son, for what he was to her, for him as he must and should be to her and to the world, for his safety, and his dignity. There was nothing between us. We were together, two women. She was appealing to me as a woman like herself. Philibert was her child. Even if she were deceiving me, pretending to care for me, what did it matter? I understood her--she was there in the great simplicity of her pretence assuming me to be like herself, proud, gentle, sure, a woman like herself. Vulgar! I was vulgar; my struggling for freedom was coarse; I was making an ugly disgusting fuss; I was ashamed.

A sensation of warmth and delight crept over me--and I knew that I had decided to do what she wanted. It seemed to me that she became my own then, and that I belonged to her and she to me. It was impossible to wound her. The most important thing in the world was not to disappoint her. She expected something of me, renouncement. She expected me to spare her son. She asked for my life, my freedom, two little things I could give her, so that she would not be disappointed. I must give them to her. It would be beautiful to make her happy. That was wonderful. Whatever happened she would always know. There would be something fine between us. We would be together. I would belong to her and she to me: two women who had understood something together.

I touched her hand. I saw that her eyes were filled with tears. Her fingers clutched mine. “_Ma pauvre enfant, ayez pitié de moi_,” she quavered.

“There dear, don’t think of it any more.”

“Wait, at least, until I am dead,” she whispered. I knelt beside her, just touching her hand. I was weeping, too, now, silently as she was, gently, mute tears.

“I will never do it,” I said. It seemed to me wonderful to give her my freedom, gently, like that, in a whisper, kneeling close to her, not frightening her, asking nothing, putting things right, easily, at the cost of all my life.

IV

I did not go to America until the following year, and then I went alone, leaving Jinny with your mother. You remember about that, how after all they made me leave my child behind as a hostage. We won’t dwell on it now. It was only significant in so far as it showed me that my new intimacy with your mother was not quite what I had believed it to be.

As for St. Mary’s Plains, it gave me a different welcome from the one I had expected. It disapproved of me and showed it. My people went for me. They greeted me with the proprietary affection that claims the right to outspoken criticism. On the whole, I liked that. It was a relief. Although at first I was bewildered, amused and occasionally annoyed by their vigorous upbraiding, I was glad that they felt entitled to treat me as they did: their scolding gave me a feeling of their solidarity with me. And it was refreshing to find myself among a group of people who had no respect for my fortune but blamed me honestly for being so disgustingly rich and doing so little good with my money.

Paris gossip had reached St. Mary’s Plains. I had thought it so far away, so safe. I was mistaken. Many acquaintances had been going back and forth across the Atlantic carrying information, more or less correct, of my doings. The fact that my husband was no longer living with me was variously interpreted. Had I come rushing home for refuge that first summer they would have been on my side, but I had not. I seemed to have cynically accepted his liaison with another woman and was brazenly continuing my worldly life.

My Aunt Patience, as I came gradually to realize, had been the person least affected by these tales. She lived the life of a hermit, wrapped up in her studies, and had refused to listen to gossip. “I guess Jane herself tells me what she wants me to know,” she had said to more than one busybody, but of course I suspected nothing of all this on arrival. I had gone to America because of an unquenchable longing to be with my own people, but I was not without a certain feeling of pride. I was scarcely fatuous enough to consider myself as a martyr, but it did seem to me that I had suffered through no fault of my own and had taken my troubles with a respectable calm. Philibert was still wandering about Europe with Bianca. I had heard nothing from him directly. An occasional message reached me through his solicitors, that was all. I had continued to carry on. I was keeping my promise to your mother.

My Aunt Patty came to New York to meet my steamer. I saw her from the deck, before the ship was in dock, a powerful figure, something elemental about her, reducing others to insignificance; I waved. She looked at me but made no sign; she did not recognize me. As I came down the gangway I saw her peering about in the crowd still searching, and when I walked up to her and said “Aunt Patty, it’s me, Jane,” she dropped her large black handbag and gave a gasp. She of course was the same, only more so, bigger and grander, with her black mackintosh flapping, her bonnet askew and wisps of grey hair hanging down, a grand old scarecrow. How she hugged me, her long arms round me, people jostling us. That was a blissful moment. I was perfectly happy for that moment, a child at rest and comforted.

Then she said, “Where’s your baby?”

“I didn’t bring her, Aunt.”

“Oh!” Her face fell.

“I couldn’t, Aunt, such a long trip for such a short visit, and her father wouldn’t let her come.”

“I see.” She shut her grim lips. It was clear that she was very disappointed.

We were to take the train that night for St. Mary’s Plains. There was some confusion about my luggage and trouble about getting it across the city. I seemed to have a great deal. A great deal too much, my Aunt said. Celestine had a difference of opinion with the porters and scolded them in her high, voluble, native tongue. My Aunt did not know what to make of Celestine.

I was ridiculously excited when we arrived at St. Mary’s Plains and drove up Desmoisnes Avenue, and then as our taxi stopped and I looked across the grass to that modest old house I had a feeling of immense relief. This was my home.

The Grey House welcomed me kindly. It had shrunk in size. It had grown shabby and ugly, but it had the charm of an old glove or shoe, much worn. I loved it with gratitude and pity and an ache of regret.

Standing in the front hall I knew that its spirit was unchanged. My mind reached out comfortably to its furthest corners, to the cupboards on the back stairs and the pantry sink that I knew as I knew my own hand. I remembered the smell of the carpet on the dark stairs and the way the Welsbach burner sizzled on the landing, spreading a round of light on the stained wall. My room was just as I had left it twelve years before. The white counterpane on the narrow bed, the flat pillow, the rag rug on the waxed floor that my Aunt Beth had made for me when I broke my arm falling off the stepladder.

Patience changed for dinner into a black silk blouse and serge skirt. Her high collar was fastened with an oval brooch of gold, the only ornament I ever saw her wear. There were two servants in the house, a cook and a housemaid. I suspected that one had been got in for my visit. It was clear to me that she was poor, even poorer than she had been. The house was not too clean and very shabby. Patience Forbes was no housekeeper. She never cared what she had to eat or poked into corners to find dust. The drawing-room looked forlorn in the pale gas light. I gathered that she never sat there but spent all her time in the museum among her precious specimens. The drawing-room made me feel dismal. In the days when my Aunt Beth kept house it had been a cosy room. Now the old mahogany sofas and chairs, covered in frayed black horsehair, were pushed back against the wall in ungainly attitudes. They seemed to watch me reproachfully. I loved their austere, proud forlornness, but I felt uncomfortable. The place did not disappoint me, but I felt that I disappointed it. The blurred and misty mirrors that held mysteriously behind their marred surfaces the invisible reflection of my little grandmother’s sweet face and prim figure showed me myself, large, bright and vulgar, a great outlandish creature in an exaggerated dress, glittering, hard and horrible. I was profoundly disturbed. If I looked like that to myself, how must I look to my Aunt Patience? I soon found out. She was not a person to mince matters. She told me plainly that I looked wicked.

“Wicked, Aunt?”

“Yes, Jane, that’s just about it.”

“But, Aunt, this is terrible. What is it? What shall I do about it?”

She stared at me grimly. “I don’t know. I guess it’s everything--your clothes, that thick bang across your eyes, those ear-rings, that red stuff on your lips. It looks bad. It makes you look like an ungodly woman.”

I rubbed off the lip salve and took off the ear-rings. “Is that better?”

“Humph. A little.” Suddenly I saw her face quiver, her mouth twist. I crossed to her and knelt on the floor beside her, put my arms round her and looked into her working face.

“Aunt, tell me, what’s the matter? Tell--”

“There, Jane, I’m an old fool.” She tried to laugh but failed. Her voice cracked. “I can’t help it. You’re so different that I’m scared. Janey, Janey, you’ve no call to be so different.” She put her large worn hands on my shoulders.

“I’m not changed in my heart, Aunt.”

“Are you sure?”

“I am sure.”

“There ain’t nothing real wrong with you, Jane?”

“No, Aunt.”

“You can tell me solemnly that your heart’s not changed, that you’ve come to no harm?”

I looked into her eyes. Humbly, I knelt and looked into those honest eyes, not beautiful, with blistered, opaque irises, the whites yellow now with age. I knew what she meant, and I knew what would put things right between us. If I told her everything, all about Philibert and Bianca and my own loneliness she would give me the sympathy I wanted. Then all her criticism and disappointment would be swallowed up in pity. I hesitated. I did not believe that she knew anything of my troubles with Philibert. I had never written her one word about being unhappy. My happiness, I knew, was the most precious thing on earth to her. How, then, tell her now, and why? Break her old heart so that she might comfort me? Sadden the remaining years of her life that I might enjoy the luxury of being understood? And how explain? What could she ever understand of such things? She was an innocent woman.

So I lied. I chose my words in order to keep as near to truthfulness as I could.

“No, Aunt, I have come to no harm. I am just the same as the girl who left you twelve years ago. My looks, why should they matter to you, Aunt? They are not my own. All that is just dressmakers and hairdressers and the people round me. I have grown to look like them there, but I am more like you and yours than you think. I have been so home-sick, Aunt. I have longed so longingly for this, just this, Aunt, just to come home.”

Her face had changed, her eyes searched mine wistfully now.

“You are unhappy, child.”

“No, Aunt.”

“Your husband?”

I felt myself turn pale as she held my head between her hands. What could I safely say? There was a look in her face that frightened me. Did she know after all? Had she heard?

“Aunt, he is a Frenchman, different from us.”

“But is he a good man?”

“Yes.”

“True to you as you are to him?”

“Yes.”

For a moment longer she looked at me closely, then with a sigh of relief leaned back. “I believe you, Jane, I always said it wasn’t true. I couldn’t believe my girl wouldn’t tell me.”

I buried my head in her knees. I felt sick and guilty, and as I knelt there I saw that long ago I had thrown over my Aunt Patience for your mother, though I loved Patience Forbes better than any one in the world.

Presently she said humorously with her slow American twang--“Well, I guess I’ll have to get used to your looks, Jane, and not be silly, but I reckon it would be easier if your voice weren’t so French. You’ve got a queer sort of accent. I don’t know what all your aunts and uncles will say when they see you. I expect if you explain it’s just the effect of the world you’ve come from they’ll think it’s a pretty queer world.”

But I had no intention of explaining myself to my relatives. Aunt Patty had the right to bring me to book, but no one else had. It seemed to me that night, lying awake in my cool, puritan bed, rather funny to think of the people of St. Mary’s Plains holding me to account. What had I done, after all, to come in for a scolding? I had told my aunt I was unchanged. In a sense it was true. If I had not been the same I should not have wanted to come.

I could hear Celestine fussing about in the next room. Celestine was going to be a thorn in the side of the Grey House. She was out of place. There she was surrounded by my clothes. My clothes looked horribly gawdy littered all over that room. Presently her light was extinguished. I lay in the dark between the sheets that smelled of lavender, my eyes open in the kind familiar darkness, and told myself that it was true, that I was unchanged, the same--the very same person that had lain in that bed in that same homely safe obscurity years before--and for a time, the sounds and the unseen but palpable presences round me, seemed to agree, to reassure me.

I heard the tram rumbling by up the Avenue, I could see in my mind’s eye, the arc light above the street shining on the high branches of the elm trees, the comfortable houses set back in their grass plots, shrouded in shadow, lighted windows showing here and there, and beyond them to the West, I knew was the river, filled with the dark hulls of ships, lumber schooners from the great lakes, pleasure boats, tugs, their red lights riding high above the black water. From the side of my bed my mind could move surely out through the night among known objects, along familiar and friendly streets, past houses and shops and churches, all acquainted with me as I was with them. And I felt the furniture of the room was kindly, sedate and prim, taking me for granted, assuming that all was well, that I belonged there--but did I? Was it true? The years seemed to have been rolled up, as if the intervening time were a parchment scroll, put away in a corner, but there was something else, something different that could not be put away. It was in me. It existed in my blood, in my body. It was restless and it gnawed me. No--no--it was not true. I was not the same. No miracle could undo what had been done to me. No relief could obliterate from my mind what I had learned. I was old--I was tired and corrupt--something irrevocable had happened to me--something final and fatal, that no longing and no prayers could ever exorcise.

St. Mary’s Plains had “got a move on” during my absence, so my relatives told me. I saw as much. It had entered upon one of those sensational periods of industrial success that come to American towns so unexpectedly. Some one had invented a stove, some one else a motor car. Former modest citizens were making millions and building factories. Down town was encroaching on the pleasant shady districts of up town. The lots on either side of the Grey House had been bought by a syndicate who proposed to put there a hotel and an apartment building. The Grey House would be sandwiched in between them. It would become a little dark building at the bottom of a well, but Patience Forbes had refused to sell, though the price offered her would have left her more than comfortably off for the rest of her life. I asked leave to buy the Grey House from her for greater security, but she refused. “I’m safe enough, Jane, because I don’t want money. No man alive can make me sell if I don’t want to. You’ve no call to worry about me.”

My Uncle Bradford was not in town but there were a great many other family connections who came to see us and asked us to come to them for large hospitable succulent meals. They greeted me with hearty kisses and handshakes. “Well, Jane, glad to see you home at last. Hope you left your husband well.” And then we settled down into chairs.

“You certainly have changed. You’re real French, aren’t you? We’ve heard a lot about your doings. It sounds pretty funny to us, giving parties all the time to crowned heads, aren’t you?” This from the men, or from the women more gently--

“Dear, couldn’t you have brought your baby? We’re so disappointed. Yes, you do seem different, but we hope you’re happy. We can’t imagine your life, you know. It seems so empty, so artificial. The papers give such strange accounts. All those gambling places, your cousin fighting a duel, it sounds so strange. France seems to be turning to atheism with terrible rapidity. The separation of Church and State might be good if it led to a spiritual revival, but they don’t keep Sunday at all, do they? All the theatres are open Sundays they say.”

The elders were gentle but positive in their disapproval, the younger generation frankly intolerant. They had been struck by various religious and emotional disturbances that had swept the country, evangelical revivals, a thing called the “Student Movement,” and a university type of socialism. I felt myself being measured up to a certain high standard and found lamentably wanting. Had I forgotten their standards, I asked myself, or was this something new? When they asked me what I was doing with my life I said I didn’t know, that it took me about all my time just to live it. Wasn’t I interested in anything? Oh, yes, a great many things, music especially, and old enamels. They didn’t mean that, they meant causes. I didn’t understand. What causes, I asked, did they refer to? Women’s suffrage, the negro question, sweated labour. No, I was obliged to admit that women’s suffrage had not interested me and that there being no negro question in France I hadn’t thought about the subject. As for sweated labour, I supposed it did exist in Paris, but that its evils had never been brought to my notice. All the young people were espousing causes. They quite took my breath away. They believed so hard in so many things, and they talked so much about the things they believed in. Really they were violent talkers. Their fresh young lips uttered with ease the most astounding phrases. They were fond of big words. Their talk was a curious mixture of undigested literature and startling slang. Some of the things they believed in were love, democracy, the greatness of the American people and the equality of the sexes. What they didn’t believe in they condemned off-hand. There was for them no quiet region where interesting questions were left pleasantly unanswered. They abhorred an unanswered question as nature abhors a vacuum. Every topic was a bull to be taken by the horns. Everything concerned them. There was nothing that was not their business. They were crusaders, at war with idleness and cynicism, vowed to the regeneration of the world. They went for me, but how they went for me! I was a renegade, a back-slider, a poor, misguided victim of an effete and vicious foreign country. I had nothing to give them of any value. When I talked of the charm of Paris they yawned. When I mentioned my friends they called me a snob. When I spoke of my activities they laughed in gay derision. On the whole I didn’t mind. I was too tired to mind. They were so young, so keen, so good to look at, so full of hope. I wouldn’t have stopped their talking for the world, and I liked them for despising my money.

I envied them. They were happy, they were free. Deep in my heart I suspected that they were right to despise my life. In the evenings when they gathered on the shadowy verandahs of their comfortable countrified houses, the young men with mandolins, the girls in billowy muslin dresses, I listened to their laughter and their tinkling music, feeling so old, so very old. On those summer nights Aunt Patty and I would sometimes sit on the front steps of the Grey House as the custom was in the town, and all the street would seem to be charged with romance and joy and mystery. Through the trees one could see young forms flitting from house to house where lights streamed from hospitable windows down across the plots of grass, while on the shadowed verandahs young hearts whispered to young hearts, whispered of dreams that must come true, gallant, innocent dreams.

And there was the difficulty of religion. They couldn’t swallow my having become a Catholic. On the first Sunday morning I asked my Aunt Patience if she would like me to go to church with her.

“Why, yes, Jane, but I thought you’d be going to the Catholic Church.”

“I’d rather go with you, Aunt.”

“Come, then.” But I saw that she was troubled.

“You see, Aunt, I don’t really care what church I go to; I’m only a Catholic for social convenience.”

“That’s too bad, isn’t it?” She was putting on her bonnet.

“I don’t know, I don’t seem to have any feeling about it one way or another. I never could seem to learn much about God, Aunt, don’t you remember?”

“But don’t you believe in Him, Jane?”

“Honestly, Aunt, I don’t know. Sometimes I wish I could, but that’s when I’m in trouble and only because I want some one to help me out. That’s not believing, is it? It’s just cowardice.”

My aunt grunted. “Religion mostly is, but there’s something else, like what your grandmother had.”

“Yes, I know.”

She said no more, and I was grateful to her for taking it like that. We were companions in spite of everything.

But when my Aunt Beth came with her husband to visit us things became more difficult. She had taken my turning Roman Catholic as a dreadful personal problem of her own, and felt, dear little soul, that she must try to bring me back to the fold. The result was painful. She came armed with tracts and pamphlets, a whole bag full of appalling literature. I was greatly astonished, for I remembered her as a very gentle little creature. With age she had grown militant in the cause of evangelical truth. She took me to camp meetings and prayer meetings. She would come into my room at night in her pink flannel dressing gown, her little middle-aged face aglow with ecstatic resolve, and would press into my hand just one more message, a dreadful booklet, “The Murder of God’s Word,” or something of that kind. I was at last driven to appeal to my Aunt Patience for protection. She took up the cudgels for me.

“I guess Jane’s all right, Beth, I wouldn’t worry. God’s the same, whatever your Church.”

“But Patty, it’s heathen idolatry, worshipping the Virgin Mary. The Virgin Mary was just a woman like you and me.”

“Well, dear, what does it matter? Perhaps Jane doesn’t worship her in a heathen spirit, do you, Jane?”

“No, Aunt, I’m afraid I don’t worship her at all.”

“But think of the Jesuits,” wailed Aunt Beth.

“I don’t,” snapped Aunt Patty.

“Patty, I believe you’re in danger of losing your faith.”

“No, I’m not, Beth, don’t you fret about me. I’ve a good conscience before my God and my Saviour. Now just you leave Jane in peace and trust her to God. That’s what you’re told to do in the Bible. Just you trust the Lord. He’ll look after Jane.”

And Beth would be momentarily silenced more by the sense of her elder sister’s family authority than by any respect for her arguments.

Aunt Patty and I were happiest when we were left alone.

In July it became very hot. The back garden was ablaze with flowers. Rows of hollyhocks lined the wooden fences at either side. Butterflies fluttered in the sun. The bee-hives at the bottom of the garden were all a-murmur. We spent long hours on the back verandah, and Aunt Patty, her knitting needles moving swiftly (she knitted a good deal, but always had a book open on her lap), would question me about my life in Paris, and I would tell her as much of the truth as I could. Her conclusions were characteristic.

“Your set over there doesn’t seem to have too much sense,” she would say. “You sound a very giddy lot. You take no interest in science, do you? I don’t suppose you’ve any of you an idea of what’s being written and done.”

“Oh, come, Aunt, some of us are awfully clever. Fan knows all about art and music. My sister-in-law paints and embroiders quite beautifully, and all our relatives are gifted.”

“Humph, art is all very well, but do you keep up with the times?”

“How do you mean, ‘keep up’?”

“I mean, child, with what’s going on in the world of thought, intellectual progress. They’re making great strides in medicine in Germany. France is doing most in mathematics. But I daresay you never heard of Professor Lautrand. He lives in Paris. Ever met him? Ever heard of him?”

“I’m afraid not, Aunt.”

“Well, there you are, one of the great spirits of the age.” And she rubbed her nose with her knitting needle. “A noble intellect. His books have opened up for me a new world. To think you could talk to him and don’t even know he’s there! Why, landsakes, Jane, if I were in your shoes I’d wait on his doorstep till my bones cracked under me.” She laughed.

“Come and visit me, dear, do, and we’ll have him to lunch every day,” I urged. At which she laughed again her young, hearty laugh, but with a wistful look in her eyes as if the light of a lovely dream glowed a moment before her.

“No, Jane, no. I’m too old to go gallivanting about Europe, but I do wish you’d take my advice. You never did take any interest in science. If you did you’d not be so dependent upon mere human beings. If you’d only study geology and biology and the history of races, you’d see that human beings are no great shakes, anyhow, and don’t count for much, save that they’ve the power of thought. Has it ever occurred to you to stop and consider how wonderful it is that you can think, and how little you avail yourself of the privilege? Go one day to the _Bibliothèque Nationale_, that’s what it’s called, they’ve got one of my books there, and just think for a moment that all that building is crammed full of the records of man’s thought. Stupid, most of it, you’d say, too dull to read, all those books. Well, that may be their fault and it may be yours, but it’s neither here nor there. The fact is that the recording of knowledge is a miracle.”

Wonderful Patience Forbes, taking me to task for the frivolity of my world, sitting on the back verandah, her spectacles on the end of her nose, her knitting on her lap, her heelless slippers comfortably crossed, her little modest volume tucked away on a shelf in the _Bibliothèque Nationale_. She seemed to me very remarkable, and she seems even more so now. Time for most of us is just a process of disintegration, old age is often pitiful and ugly, but at the age of sixty-five Patience Forbes had the heart of a child and the robust enthusiasm of a student. She had been persuaded by the State Board of Education to write a series of text-books on birds, and in the evenings she would work in the room she called the museum, and I would sit watching her while she chewed her pen, rapped irritably with her hard old fingers on the desk, or went down on her knees before a shelf of books to look up some reference. Sometimes she would walk the floor and grumble--“Gracious, how difficult it is to write a decent sentence. English certainly isn’t my strong point. I write like a clucking hen. Style never was in my line.” And then she would laugh, her young, vigorous, chuckling laugh.

When I compared my life with hers, how could I not feel that there was justice in all that young American condemnation. Patience Forbes was old, she was poor, she went about in tram-cars, she worked for her living, and she was happy. There was no doubt that she was happy. She envied no man and no woman, and asked nothing of any one. She would not even let me help her. She said that she had everything she wanted and I was bound to believe her.

Early in August we went up to my Uncle Bradford’s camp in the woods at the head of the lake. He had written urging us to come and saying that if we didn’t he would come down to St. Mary’s Plains as he wanted particularly to see me.

A white steam-boat, with side paddles churning peacefully through the water, carried us for a long day and night and part of another day west by north-west, past little white straggling towns, calling at long piers to deliver mails and provisions, moving on and on, farther and farther across the wide shining expanse of water, away from the world of men. Timber schooners passed us, square-rigged, coming down from the great forest lands. The skies were boundless and light and high above the water. We moved in marvellous translucent space. The air was new as if the world had been created yesterday.

Uncle Bradford and his sons with their wives and children had built themselves log houses on the shore of the lake. The forest stretched away behind them as far as the Canadian border, and a great tract of it belonged to them, with its rivers, its game and its timber. Some of them were in the lumber business, others came there merely for the summer holidays. I found my Aunt Minnie there, and an even greater crowd of youngsters than in St. Mary’s Plains. Uncle Bradford, dressed in a red flannel shirt and a sombrero, ruled his camp like a Russian patriarch, and again I found every one interested in things that I had forgotten were interesting. There in that glorious pagan world surrounded by virgin forests they worshipped a stern and exacting God, read the Bible, and argued in the evening before the blazing log fire as to whether the mind were separate from the soul, or evolution incompatible with the principles of Christianity. And I wondered at them, for they were not afraid of their puritan God, nor weary of endless argument. Their consciences were clear. They could look God in the face, and their brains, if rather empty, were admirably keen.

I watched the women. They all seemed to have devoted husbands who assumed the sanctity of marriage to be the basis of life and took the beauty of their women for granted. Extravagant youngsters, how I envied them. Husbands who remained faithful lovers, wives who remained innocent girls, all contented and unafraid, and with their outspokenness, shy people keeping secret the sacred intimacy of love.

The children were splendid animals. They liked me and included me in their games. We used to go swimming before breakfast when the heavenly morning was crystal pale. I would slip from my cabin and join those little bronze figures, run through the clearing to the shore and down the wooden pier, stand an instant with them all about me breathing in the sweet air, then with a shout all together we would dive. I swam as well as any of those boys. It pleases me now to remember their respect for my prowess. And I could paddle a canoe and throw a ball like a man, and I caught the largest fish of all, a fine big salmon trout weighing fifteen pounds. My thought was--“I want a boy like one of these to become a man for Jinny. I want her to have a husband from my people.”

It was a delicious life. The air was fine and dry and sharply scented with the scent of pine woods drenched in sunlight. Each morning was a miracle as clear as the first morning of creation. Swift rollicking streams tumbled over rocks, fat salmon jumped in deep pools. Mild-eyed Indians came travelling down from the depths of the vast forest, paddling their lovely canoes of birch bark, laden with grass baskets and soft moccasins embroidered in beads. The nights were cold. One was lifted up into sleep, one floated up and away into sleep under sparkling stars, hearing the waves lapping the shore and the wind murmuring through the branches of the innumerable pines of the forest that spread away, further and further away, endlessly, countless trees murmuring a strong chant under the wide sky, stretching beyond the edge of the mind’s compass, as far as one could think, as far as one’s soul could reach out, the forest, the sky, the water, calm, untroubled, eternal.

Then suddenly something crashed into that crystal space.

My Uncle Bradford took me one morning to his office.

“You are nearly thirty now, Jane.”

“Yes, Uncle.”

“I have a letter for you from your father. He left it with me to deliver to you when you were thirty years old.”

I took the envelope he handed me. I was trembling. My uncle mopped his forehead and cleared his throat.

“You will be absolute owner of your property when you are thirty.”

“Oh,” I said blankly.

“Yes, you were not to know. It was your father’s wish. Did your mother, before she died, tell you anything about him?”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“Well, I’m sorry. It was her place to tell you. Your father is buried out west, in Oregon.”

“Yes, I know.”

“He’s not buried in a cemetery. He’s buried on a hill. He bought the tract of land himself.”

I waited. The noises of the camp came cheerily through the cabin windows. There was a strong smell of pine wood and resin and of bacon frying somewhere out of doors.

“Your father broke his neck falling down the elevator shaft in a New York hotel. The verdict was accidental death, but it was not an accident. Your mother knew, and I knew.”

I stood up, staring at him stupidly, holding the letter in my fingers, then quickly turned and went out. I crossed the camp and struck off into the woods. In a quiet place I sat down and opened the letter. It began, “My dear daughter Jane.” I know it by heart. This is the letter.

“_My dear daughter Jane_: It is time for me to go. A man is free to choose his time. This I believe, not much else. I am sorry to leave you, but you are only five years old and you will be better off with your grandmother in St. Mary’s Plains than you would be with me. Your grandmother and your aunts will take care of you. They are good women. It’s not their fault that they don’t like me. The truth is, Jane, that I’m not their kind. I’m nobody’s kind and I’m awful tired of being alone in a crowd. This world is getting too full of people for me. I want space and I guess I’ll find it where I’m going.

I wouldn’t leave you so much money if I knew what to do with it. It never did me any good. It was only fun getting, not having. At first I worked with my hands--in the earth--then I found gold. I bought land and more land, built a railroad or two, and then Wall Street got me. That was like the poker table I’d known when I was a boy working on the Chippevale Ranch. That was just excitement, no good to any one, but fun for a spell.

When you are thirty years old you’ll have as much sense as you’re ever going to have. Perhaps you’ll do better than I did. Perhaps you’ll know how to spend. I didn’t. I’d like you to enjoy what I’ve left you. It would console me some.

I’m not a believer in the Cross of Jesus and I don’t want it on my grave, but I’m not sure there isn’t something over yonder on the other side. I hailed from the far West. It’s spoiling now, but a wide prairie and a high sky are the best things I know, that and working with your hands.

Good-bye, little girl Jane, you’re the only thing I mind leaving behind. I’d kind of like to know what you’ll be like when you get this.

Your Uncle Bradford’s an honest man, there aren’t many, you can trust him. He’ll give you this and explain that there was no disgrace. Only I didn’t feel like living any more. There are too many people hanging round. I want to get away. If I’m doing you a wrong by quitting I ask you to forgive me.

“Your loving father, “_Silas Carpenter_.”

I worked it out that night with maps and time-tables. I had just enough time to go to Redtown and get back to New York to catch my boat. I left the next morning. My aunt went with me. Uncle Bradford’s steam launch took us down the lake. We caught a train at a place called Athens and joined the western express the middle of the next day. It took us three days and three nights to get to Oregon. We crossed the Mississippi river early one morning. The next day we thundered through the Rocky Mountains. The plains beyond were immense and stupefying.

I visited the grave alone. A block of granite, reminding me of a druid’s stone, marked the spot on the hill where he was buried. It stood up stark and solid on the bare ground. It looked as if it had been left there endless ages before by some slow, gigantic movement of nature, some glacier travelling by inches from the north, or some heaving of the earth’s surface. One side of it was polished and bore an inscription cut into the stones:--

“HERE LIES SILAS CARPENTER, WHO WAS BORN IN THIS PLACE BEFORE IT WAS A TOWN AND WHO DIED IN NEW YORK ON JANUARY 5TH 1885.”

From the hill-top one had a view of the city lying along the sea, a new, bright city, an unfriendly sea of a dazzling blue. I sat down on the grass by the great stone. Here, at last, was something that belonged to me and to no one else. No one would dispute with me the possession of my father’s grave. I felt excited and uplifted as if I had come into a precious inheritance. And yet what had he left me? A message of failure, an unanswered question, a sense of not having counted for him enough myself to keep him on the earth. He had shuffled me off with the rest of it. My mother must have hated him. She must have had something to do with his giving it up like that. I would have loved him. I would have understood him. If he had waited for me we would have been good companions. If he had lived I would never have gone to Paris. I would have gone west with him to his wide prairie and high skies. Everything would have been different. I had missed something. What had I missed? I looked out across the dry grass, the rolling hills, the big, bare, blazing land, the glittering sea under the windy sun, and I recognized it as mine. I had missed my life. I had taken the wrong turn.

We boarded the train again next day and recrossed the continent of America. It took us seven days and nights to reach New York. We passed through Denver, Chicago, Cleveland, and countless other cities. We crossed deserts white as sand and overgrown with cactus. In the middle of the Mohawa desert we stopped at a place called Bagdad to give the engine a drink of water. Bagdad was a single wooden shed standing in a waste of sand. Bagdad, Bagdad. It was very hot in the train. My aunt and I sat most of the time on the open platform at the end of the observation car, watching the earth fly from under the train and drinking iced drinks that the coloured porters brought us. It is very exciting to be in a train like that, rushing across the earth at such speed, suspended in space as if on a giant bridge, and the vast, the immense, the overwhelming panorama flying endlessly past. Cities, rivers, prairies, mountains, lonely farms, the steel jaws of stations engulfing you, out again through the crowding buildings of a city you will never know, full of people you will never see, into the open, the horizon endlessly wheeling, the earth under the train flying backwards, but the far edge of the earth towards the horizon wheeling with you. Thundering along, the pounding of the engine, the grinding wheels exciting your brain to a special liveliness, the train is a miraculous thing, a steel comet cushioned inside imitating a dwelling, but a long comet whirring through space, a blaze of flying light by night, a streak and a noise by day, and from it you look out upon a thousand worlds flying past, and you have glimpses, instant, quick glimpses, of countless mysterious lives, a group of children hanging over a fence waving, a farmer in a wide straw hat sitting in a blue wagon at a railway crossing, a boundless golden field behind him of innumerable garnered sheaves all gold, a village like a collection of wooden boxes, saddled horses tethered to a rope in front of an unpainted post office. Cowboys driving cattle, rolling prairies, horses, wild, running, kicking up their heels, a lonely cabin against a hill, hens scratching outside, thin smoke coming from the wobbling iron smoke stack, lost in the boundless blue; families moving, all their household goods piled on wagons, the men walking beside the horses with long whips, a mail coach lurching along a mountain road, the driver has a Colt revolver in his pocket. You know that. You hope he’ll get the highway robbers who will be waiting for him at dark. Bret Harte wrote about him. And now Walt Whitman’s country--Leaves of Grass--a great poem, the greatest. He knew. He had found out. He understood the giant, the great urge of life, in this my country.

And I thought of my father, crossing and recrossing the continent, restless, lonely, powerful, dissatisfied, an isolated man moving up and down the land, handling money, gambling with money, not knowing what to do, growing tired of it all.

I said to my aunt--“It was twenty-five years ago, but it brings him close.”

“Your father’s death?”

“Yes, it makes a difference.”

“How?”

“I’m with him. It clears the ground.”

I did not quite know what I meant then, but I know now.

We reached New York. I was suddenly filled with foreboding. In the high window of our towering hotel I sat with Patience far into the night. We sat together like watchers in a tower, and a million lighted windows shone before us in the blue night.

“I am afraid, Aunt.”

“Why, my child?”

“I am afraid to leave you.”

“Yes, I know.”

How much did she know, I wondered? What did she suspect? Philibert had not written to me, of course. She must have noticed. She must know a good deal.

“You have your little girl, Jane. Think of her.”

“I do. She’s a prim little thing, not a bit like me.”

“Promise me to love your child, to love her enough.”

“Enough for what, dear?”

“Just enough; you’ll find out how much that is.”

“I will try to love her as you have loved me, Aunt, always.”

She gripped my hand. “Janey,” she muttered, “my girl.” We sat a long time silent. The desire to unburden all my heart was unbearable. But it was too late now.

“Europe is too full of people, Aunt. They have made the earth into a trivial thing. It is not good for people to subdue the earth. In Paris one is never out of doors. I don’t feel at home there. I am sick for my own country, for a wide prairie and a high sky.”

“You’ll come back again, Jane.”

“Yes,” I answered, “I will come back.”

I thought she was asking for a promise. I did not know that she was stating a prophecy.

And in the morning I went aboard my ship and my aunt left me and went down the gangway onto the pier, and the ship moved slowly away from the dock. There she was again, standing in the crowd in her queer black clothes, but this time the water between us was widening. She lifted both her arms to me in a last large gesture of full embrace, then her arms fell to her sides, and she stood there buffeted by the wind, jostled by the crowd, a strong old woman, looking after me bravely. I had a desperate moment. I wanted to jump, to swim back. I felt an agony of regret, of longing, of warning. I struggled. It was horrible, such pain. What did it mean? Why was I going? It was wrong, it was wrong.

I never saw her again.

V

I slipped back into Paris, its pleasant walls closed round me, and the voice I had heard over there, in my wide country was hushed. It was like coming out of a great open space into a room. There was all at once about me a multitude of nice pretty things, a shimmer of lights, a harmony of bright sounds, the smooth, soothing, flattering touch of luxury. No whisper of elemental forces could penetrate here. Men of incomparable taste and limited vision had made this place to suit themselves.

Jinny was waiting for me, a prim fairy with starry eyes, standing daintily on tip-toe to be kissed, smoothing her white frock carefully after my hug. She told me that she had seen her Papa. He had been on a visit to _Grand’ mère_! He had given her a strawberry ice in the Bois and had taken her to see Punch and Judy. Then he had gone far away to a country where old kings were buried and one rode on camels across the sand. The _Guignol_ had been very amusing, but she had agreed with her papa that she was rather old for Punch and Judy. Some day he would come back and take her to big parties. I looked at Jinny, little Jinny, who didn’t like to be hugged, pirouetting on one toe and looking at herself in the glass, and I remembered my promise to Patience Forbes. It wasn’t enough to dote on my child, to crave her sweetness, her caresses, her laughter. There would be a struggle. There would be endless things. I saw them coming, all the events of her poor little life, so spectacular in its setting. I was there to ward them off, to challenge fate and the future, to love her with enough wisdom and enough tenacity and enough self-abasement to--well, to see her through.

And I had an idea that she wouldn’t help me much. She would perhaps always be content to curtsey to herself in the glass. I felt this, but I felt it with less keenness than I expected. There seemed something a little unreal about struggling desperately to ward off evil from my child. There were flowers in the room, orchids and violets and roses, sent to greet me. A sheaf of letters, invitations to lunch, to dine, to listen to music. The first night of the Russian Ballet was announced for the following week. Rodin asked me to his studio to see a new bronze. Beauty all about me, amusement, stimulus, within easy reach, treasures of pleasure like sugared fruit hanging from fantastic branches waiting to be plucked.

Your mother’s kiss of greeting showed me that Philibert’s visit had made a difference. It was a cold, gay little peck and was accompanied by nervous pats and hurried playful remarks on a high, forced note. Clearly she was nervous. Almost, it seemed, as if she were afraid of me. Poor little _belle-mère_. She had fallen in love with her son all over again, but why need that make her afraid of me? I was disappointed and annoyed by her renewed subterfuges. It seemed to me strange that she should think I would begrudge her the pleasure her son could still give her. I thought of explaining my feelings to Claire, but Claire was not in a receptive mood and there was after all nothing to be gained by it. I was a little tired of explaining. I was, I found, even a little tired of the de Joigny family. My obligations to them and theirs to me seemed less important since my return. It occurred to me that I had taken myself and my problems with a ridiculous seriousness. I was still very fond of your mother, but I no longer asked of her the impossible. All that I now wanted of the family was a sufficiently respectable show of approval and a mild give-and-take of friendliness. I felt equal to living a life of my own and I proposed doing so. When you suggested giving a dinner for me in your rooms I was delighted. You promised me Ludovic and half a dozen of the best brains in Paris. That seemed to me an excellent way to begin.

Aunt Clothilde sent for me one morning a few days later. I found her in bed under an immensely high canopy of crimson damask, sipping a cup of the richest chocolate, a coarse, white cambric cap, like a peasant woman’s, tied under her double chin, her wig hung on the bed-post. The room was vast and stuffy and dark and hung with dingy tapestries. On one side of the bed sat her _dame de compagnie_, knitting, on the other a frightened priest with a sallow, perspiring face. Aunt Clo waved a plump hand as I came in. The duenna and the priest rose hurriedly.

“No, _mon Père_, I won’t help you. You are no doubt a saintly man, but that’s not enough for the business in hand. You’ve not got the brains. You couldn’t preach to a lot of worldly women, you’re too timid. Look at yourself now. You’re trembling before a wicked old woman who may have some influence with the Archbishop but has none whatever with Saint Peter. Come, _mon Père_, brace up and go to the heathen. There’s a nice post vacant in Madagascar. I’ll put in a word for you there if you like.”

The poor man’s face worked painfully. He murmured something and scuttled away across the great room. The little companion held open the door for him and followed him out.

Aunt Clothilde turned to me. “Blaise,” she began at once, motioning me to sit down, “has asked me to dine with him. Does he dine? Has he a cook? He says so, but how do I know? What will he give me to eat? He says the dinner is for you. Since when has he taken to giving his sister-in-law dinners? He wants me to put you in countenance, and to impress his disreputable bohemian friends. He says they are all geniuses. What is a genius? Your mother-in-law thinks they all died in the seventeenth century. She may be right. How can one be sure? And why should I dine with a genius? Is that a reason? He promises me, as if it were a favour, that man Ludovic, a monster with greasy grey curls who worships an Egyptian cat. Blaise says he is a very great scholar and that you deserve a little pleasure. Will you find pleasure in his old scholar? Why should you? I’d rather have a beautiful young fool myself. It appears the family is horrid to you. Is that so? Wouldn’t let you take your child to America, eh? Well, I don’t mind having a dig at the family. Tiresome people, always splitting hairs. And you’re a good girl. You’ve got pluck, but I thought you were going to hurt Bianca that night.” She chuckled. “Well, what do you think? Shall I come to this dinner to meet your crazy friends?”

“They’re not mine, Aunt, I don’t know them.”

“You know Clémentine, she likes you. She’s all right, a Bourbon and a S---- on her mother’s side, but of course as mad as a March hare, and no morals. She doesn’t need ’em. But don’t take after her, you’ve got ’em and you need ’em. All Anglo-Saxons are like that. Take care. Of course it would be no more than Philibert deserves.”

I laughed. “You talk, Aunt, as if Blaise’s friends weren’t proper.”

“Proper, what’s that? Aren’t they just the most disreputable people on earth? Isn’t that why they’re amusing? Really clever people are never proper. It takes every drop of Clémentine’s blue blood to keep her afloat, and that man Felix! these writers with their habits of sleeping all day, Blaise tells me he is writing a play without words. It must be witty. _En voilà une occasion pour faire de l’esprit._ And the Spaniard, the painter, it appears that he wants to do a fresco for my music room. Well, he won’t. Only, if he doesn’t for me, he will for François. Blaise says he’s the greatest mural painter since Tiepolo. I detest that ‘_Trompe l’œil_’ school, but I’d like to spite François. What do you think? I’m very poor this year. I sold a forest for half its value. Now then, what about Philibert--gone to Egypt with his little salamander, has he?”

“I believe so, Aunt.”

“And you? You don’t look very sad.”

“I don’t think I am, Aunt.”

“Good, excellent; you console yourself, eh?”

“No, Aunt, I don’t; not, that is, in the way you mean.”

“Rubbish; don’t look so virtuous, child. If you haven’t already, you soon will. We all do. It’s a law of nature. My husband was the dullest man on earth, I couldn’t abide him. If he hadn’t been the first Duke of France no one would ever have asked him to dinner. How do you think I put up with him for twenty years? You find me an ugly old woman, very fat, very fond of good cooking. My child, there are only two kinds of pleasure worth having in this world, and one of them has to do with the stomach. I’ve enjoyed both. I now only enjoy one. That’s enough. What a face you make at me! If you go against the laws of nature you’ll get into trouble.”

“But, Aunt, seriously, these clever friends of Blaise--are they disreputable?”

“Child, child, how boring you are, you Americans have such literal minds. All I mean is that they’ve no moral sense. They’ve something else though in its place, something better, perhaps, or worse, anyhow more discriminating.”

“I see.”

“No, you don’t, but it doesn’t matter. You’ve a moral sense that bothers the life out of you. Now go along with you. I must get up. I’ll come to your party. Your mother-in-law won’t approve. She’s a superior person. As for you, God knows what you’ll be in ten years time with such a husband and such a conscience. I had better keep an eye on you. In the choice of a lover you can ask my advice. I know men. They’re not worth much, but you don’t take or refuse one for that reason. You’ve found that out for yourself by now.”

She dismissed me, waving again her little fat hand from under the immense canopy of her bed.

I left her, amused and rather exhilarated. A wicked old woman and a very great lady. It didn’t occur to me to take her seriously, but I liked her. All the same, the last thing I wanted was a lover. The mere thought filled me with disgust.

Your dinner was awfully nice, Blaise dear. I remember the evening well. A few snowflakes softly floated down in your little courtyard as old Albert, your manservant, in his ancient green coat, opened the door. He had cooked the dinner and arranged the table and made the fire in the living room and put the champagne on ice; I knew that, but his manner was of a fine, calm formality as he ushered Aunt Clo and myself into your presence. A group of men who somehow impressed one as not at all ordinary, and a bright little lady dressed like a parrot, in a tiny, shabby, candle-lit room, filling the place comfortably with their easy good-humour, that was my first impression, followed quickly by others, pleasant, special impressions, aspects sharp and neat in an atmosphere that gave one a feeling of tasting a fine subtle flavour. Each person in the room was an individual unlike any one else. With no beauty to speak of, several were old men in oddly cut clothes, they were more interesting to watch than any lovely creature. Their faces were worn and lined and gentle, thin masks through which one saw the fine play of intelligence. Some were already known to the great world of thought and public affairs, others have since become so, but all were simple, homely men that night, with a certain childlike gaiety that was very appealing.

Albert’s food was excellent; succulent, substantial food that suggested the provinces. The wine was very old. For a moment as I watched your convives inhaling the bouquet from lifted glasses, I imagined myself far away in Balzac’s country, a snowy street of silent houses stretching out between high poplars to a great river, a carriage at the door, with a postillion in a three-cornered hat, waiting to drive me to some romantic rendezvous. But the talk swept me along with its merry-go-round of the present.

I cannot, after all these years, recall what was said, impossible to recapture now the quick turns of wit, the dry little jokes, the swift touches of poetry, that followed each other with such rapid intellectual grace. It was all incredibly rapid. I could just manage to keep up with the sense of it. I didn’t attempt to take part. Ideas were as thick in that room as confetti at a fête. Clémentine, in an apple-green dress, with a round red spot of rouge on either cheek, swayed this way and that in response to innumerable sallies, her face changing like lightning. She was a match for those men. Her wit played over the history of her country like a jolly little ferret nosing out and pouncing upon joke and anecdote from the vast field of the past. Cardinals, princes, and ruffians were held up to ridicule. International affairs were dealt with clearly and deftly by her cutting tongue. She played with the ideas round her as if they were a swarm of brilliant darting winged creatures. Her delight in this battle of wit was contagious. The talk grew faster and faster. Soon every one was talking at once. No one could finish a sentence.

Cambon was explaining to Aunt Clothilde why the Government would not tolerate an Ambassador to the Pope. Clémentine was defending the English, no one appeared to like the English. Felix was making fun of Diaghilev, the new Russian who had appeared with his Imperial Ballet a week before.

What delightful people! Certainly without reservation of any kind I find them now as I did then the most delightful people in the world. Ludovic wore a celluloid collar. His body was too heavy for his legs and his head too big for his body; no matter; his profound, quiet gaze and tired, brown face expressed a nobility that made one ashamed of noticing his ill-cut coat. Felix looked like a faun. With his exaggerated features thrust forward into the candle-light he said funny, penetrating things that kept Aunt Clo chuckling. I watched, fascinated. These were the people Aunt Clo called disreputable, utterly lacking in a moral sense. Were ever sinners so joyous, so light-hearted? Rebels against creeds, against the fixed order of society, against the didactic spoken word, they were kind to me, the Philistine, exerting at once and with unconscious ease the most disarming charm.

Vaguely I recalled the mentality of my American home. It was there behind me, like a cold and lifeless plaster cast behind a curtain. Here was something infinitely more interesting, something brilliantly living, something merry and subtle and fine that defied disapproval. The powers of evil? Chimeras! No room for them here, no room for anything dismal and boring. I felt an uplift, it was like an awakening. All that horror of soul searching, all the dreary puritan A. B. C. of right and wrong was a childish nightmare. These people understood the world. They made fun of evil. They loved each other and found no fault with their friends. Under their gaiety was a deep sympathy for poor humanity.

They said things that would have sent St. Mary’s Plains reeling with horror into one large devastating revival meeting. If St. Mary’s Plains could have dreamed of the character of their conversation it would call upon God to destroy them. I laughed. Albert filled my glass.

Some one was saying--

“Time is a circle.”

“The sunrise, why the same sun? Who knows?”

“Truth? Why should one want truth? Truth is a thing we have invented. An accurate statement of facts? But there is no accuracy except in mathematics, and in mathematics there are no facts.”

Were they joking? Or were they serious? Both. I felt like a schoolgirl, very ignorant, very crude, with a stiff blank mind like a piece of cardboard. They slowed down to listen to Ludovic. I remember Ludovic speaking to them all with his eyes smiling under their spiky grey eyebrows. I think I remember what he said. It was the first time I had heard him talk, as he talked to me so often afterwards.

“I sit in some old city of the past and look back upon the present and still further back into the future. Why not? Time is an endless circle, wheeling around one. Why trouble to imagine a beginning or an end? Why these unnatural conceptions? The old legends are more sensible. The ancient mystic symbol of matter, Ouroborro, the tail-devourer, a serpent coiled into a circle, symbol of evolution, of the evolution of matter. There is something there, something to think of. Let us all think of molecules, and remember the Philosopher’s Stone. Have you ever laughed at the legend of the Philosopher’s Stone that can transmute metals and give the elixir of life? What if it were discovered, this stone? Suppose radium were in the legend stone of long ago. Wouldn’t that suggest to you that we have only just discovered out of the long labour of our known cycle of civilization something that was known before by another race of men? Who knows, perhaps that race conquered its earth with this stone, turned it from a savage planet like this of ours into a Garden of Eden, and then, surfeited with ease, died of inertia, lapsed into darkness, fell from the Heaven it had made. That is to say, Adam, the father of our race, may have been the last survivor of a race of fallen gods, supermen.”

Clémentine took my arm as we went out of the dining-room.

“You find us a little mad?” she asked.

“Oh, no.”

“Tell us how you find us. You are different, big and strong and young and strange. Your point of view about us would be something new.”

“I find you extraordinarily happy.”

“Oh yes, we are gay.”

The men had followed us.

“We laugh.”

“We find the world so funny.”

“But we’re serious too. There’s Ludovic as solemn as a trout. He’d be dreary if we let him be.”

“Only we don’t. Why should one worry? One can’t change anything. You must be one of us. It’s so amusing with us. You will see how amusing it is.”

So it was that they adopted me. And that night as I drove home through the moonlit streets I thought of St. Mary’s Plains with distaste and impatience.

But what I remember best of all about that evening was the sweet funny way you beamed down the table when you saw that your friends liked me. You were, you know, just a little nervous about the impression I would make on them. They were so much more brilliant than any one else that I don’t wonder. But it all went off well, bless your heart, thanks to the penetrating sweetness of your will that willed us to be pleased with one another.

There followed years of power and pleasure. Your friends made good their promise. They taught me to enjoy. Ludovic began to form my mind. Clémentine gave me the daring to use it. I learned how pleasant it was to follow one’s caprices, to indulge one’s tastes, to realize one’s dreams. Do you remember the things we did? What indeed didn’t we do, with our picture shows, our pantomimes, and our music? When we wanted to do a thing we did it. When we wanted to go to a place we went. What fun it was going off at a moment’s notice to Seville, to Constantinople, to Moscow. Some one would say--“Have you seen the _Place Stanislas_ at Nancy by moonlight? No? But you must.” “Let’s go tomorrow,” and we went. Or--“I hear that at Grenoble there is a lady who owns a glove shop and who has in her back parlour a Manet, let us go and buy it, if it is true.” Of course we went and found it was true and bought it. Felix it was who took us all the way to Strasbourg for one night and day, to eat a pâté de foie gras and hear mass in the Cathedral.

But we were happiest of all in Paris. Paris was inexhaustible. Not a nook or cranny of interest and charm escaped us. Sometimes early in the spring mornings we would walk through silvery streets or along the quais or take the penny steamer down the Seine. We sampled every restaurant known to our gourmet Felix. We sat in icy studios at the feet of shy ogres. Even Dégas thawed to us, while rare spirits from odd corners of the earth joined us in the evenings. And increasingly the beauty of Paris was revealed to me. I cared for it intimately now, and I loved its smooth pale historic stones with a delicate sensuousness.

I was happy. I was as happy as an opium eater. I lived in a continuous mood of enjoyment that had the quality of a dream. All this was mine to behold and delight in, and I was responsible for none of it. I was passive. I was calm. The play played itself out about me, and I was in no way involved. What people did and what they didn’t do had no real significance. When Ludovic said: “A man has as much right to take life as to give it,” I thought placidly, “Perhaps so, in this world.” When he denounced property and capitalists and said we should all be poor, I thought, of course, that is so, and when he pointed out to me a woman who had killed her father because he was cross-eyed and got on her nerves, I merely looked at her with mild curiosity. He said that she was very sensitive and charming, and I believed him. It didn’t seem to matter.

And if at times it occurred to me that I was becoming callous and selfish, at others I felt that I was becoming intelligent and charitable.

Jinny was my one responsibility, a little will-o’-the-wisp creature who danced into my room of a morning to drop a kiss on my nose and dance out again. Jinny, so entrancingly pretty, so ridiculously dainty, who never soiled her hands or tore her frock or spilled her food, who said her prayers night and morning to a silver crucifix that her father had sent her from Italy, and who confessed her minute sins every Friday to a priest but never confided in her mother.

My child baffled me. There was nothing in my own childhood’s experience that threw any light on the little close mystery of her nature. She didn’t like animals, she hated romping about, she was afraid of the cold. What she liked was to be curled up on cushions in front of the fire and listen to fairy stories. Her indolence was complete, her capacity for keeping still, extraordinary in one who moved so lightly when she did move. Sometimes when I looked up from the book I was reading aloud to her, I would find her great brown eyes fixed on me with a look of uncanny wisdom. She seemed to disapprove of me. I wondered if this had anything to do with the teaching of her priestly tutors that her father had prescribed for her, or whether it sprang from a natural precocious feeling of the difference between us. We were certainly a strange couple. Even in moments of my most anguished tenderness, I could not but feel the incongruity. The idea that she was much more her father’s daughter than mine was one that I tried not to dwell on.

I had been going happily along, thinking that I could enjoy this adventurous life of my new friends without being involved in it, when I found out that I was much less free than I thought. Your mother did not approve, I knew, and I gathered that she blamed you for leading me astray, but it came nevertheless as a surprise when she gently interfered.

“Aren’t you making yourself a little notorious, my child?” she asked one day.

“Notorious _belle-mère_?”

“Yes. Dining in restaurants in the company of such strange men.”

“They are not very strange, dear, except in being so very intelligent, and I never, at least scarcely ever, dine alone with men. There is almost always Clémentine.”

“I know, that’s just it. For a chaperone, you couldn’t have chosen worse.”

“But surely, _Belle Mère_, I need no chaperone, I am old enough to go about alone?”

She closed her eyes wearily, opened them and spoke sharply.

“French women of good family never go about alone, and never dine in public places.”

“But Clémentine--”

“Don’t talk to me of Clémentine.” I was startled by the sudden note of sharp personal grievance in her voice. “Her conduct is scandalous. Her mother was my first cousin and dearest friend. It is fortunate that she is dead. How could she be blamed for that marriage, yet Clémentine always blamed her and set to work deliberately to make her suffer.”

“I know nothing of Clémentine’s marriage.”

“Well, her husband--but no matter, there is no excuse for her making herself an object of derision.”

“I scarcely think she does that, dear, she is in great demand you know, in the very highest quarters.”

“At foreign courts, perhaps, not in her own country. If it weren’t for the obligations of kinship no one, but no one would speak to her.”

“Just what is it that she has done that you so disapprove of?”

“She has made herself cheap. She has vulgarized her position, she plays at being a bohemian, she has bartered away her dignity for a little sordid amusement.”

“And I?”

“You are in danger of doing the same, but in greater danger.”

I was annoyed and rose and moved to the door.

“You are going?”

“I am afraid I must. I have an appointment.”

“Ah, you resent my speaking to you?”

“No, dear, but--”

“But--?”

“I am afraid I cannot quite agree with you.”

Her face hardened. I made an effort.

“_Belle-mère_, I am doing no wrong. Surely you believe that. These men are nothing to me, not one of them.”

Her eyebrows lifted. “You love no one?” she asked.

“No.”

“That too, is just as I thought.”

“You wouldn’t mind that, I suppose?”

“Mind it? How should I? How would it concern me?”

I was a little taken aback. “It only matters then what I seem to do, not what I really do?”

She smiled, rather sarcastically, I thought. “Put it that way if you like, my child.”

“But, _belle-mère_, don’t you really understand at all, that I am trying to be happy and keep my self-respect?”

She eyed me a moment strangely, then dropped her head.

“We will never understand each other,” she said at last. “We won’t discuss things any more. It leads to nothing.”

But Claire felt that she, too, must make an attempt to bring me to reason. She attacked me on the subject of Geneviève. There she was clever. Was I not neglecting my child a little? No, I replied I was not. I was out so much, I seemed to take so little interest in her education. At this I flared up.

“Her education, my dear, is as you know, not in my hands. Her father has made clear his wishes on that subject. Her mind is confided to the keeping of Monseigneur de Grimont and you know what he is doing with it better than I do. What with her prayers, her masses and her confessions, her priestly tutors who instructed her in Latin and Greek, Italian and Spanish, and the good sisters who teach her to embroider altar pieces and to believe every ridiculous miracle in the lives of the saints, such healthy heathen interests as I can cultivate in her little ecstatic soul have small chance of flourishing.”

“But Jane, surely she has her dancing, her riding, her music?”

“Yes, of course, she has everything, everything, but no time for her mother. Her days are as full as a time table. Try as I may, I can never get more than an hour a day with her. How then am I to make her my life’s occupation? That’s what you meant, wasn’t it? You said I neglected her.”

“What I meant was that you seem to have forgotten us all, Geneviève included, and to have forgotten what we and therefore what she must stand for in society.”

“On the contrary.”

“You mean--?”

“I mean that I constantly think of it, but perhaps not just as you do.”

“Well, if you want your daughter to take Clémentine as a pattern.”

“I don’t,” and then added with deliberate wickedness, “I wouldn’t have poor little Jinny attempt anything so impossible.”

“You admire her so much?”

“I do.”

“But she’s grotesque. She goes in for politicians and for journalists.”

“I adore her.”

“She’s shameless--her affairs--”

I cut her short. “I know nothing about her affairs. What I know is that she has a generous soul, a warm heart and the most brilliant mind in Paris. No other woman in Paris can touch her for brains.”

Claire lifted her eyebrows. I saw that she washed her hands of me. At the moment I was glad of it. As for Clémentine, she cared nothing for what Claire or any one else thought of her. She was a law unto herself. Her love affairs, of which I knew more than I admitted, were as necessary to her as her meals. She must have food, and she attached no great importance to it. An artistic find, an amusing trip or an exciting debate in the Chamber of Deputies, would make her forget with equal ease her lunch or a sentimental rendezvous. Her relations with men didn’t seem to me to be any of my business. There was a certain recklessness there that I didn’t understand. I left it at that. It was Fan who told me about Clémentine’s marriage.

“My dear, her husband had unnatural tastes. He kicked her downstairs a month after the wedding. She can never have any children, and she hasn’t spoken to him since. Also, she is said to have said that she would never again have anything to do with a man of her own world. If she did, well, she has kept her word. Her mother stopped her getting her marriage annulled. Clémentine never got over that. She’s at war with the whole tribe of her relations, but of course she can’t cut loose from them for she hasn’t a son, and anyhow one doesn’t in France. So her revenge is to do just those things that most irritate them. They wouldn’t mind a bit how many lovers she had if she would choose them from her own class, and preserve the usual appearances. What they can’t bear is her going about with men whose fathers made boots or sold pigs. And in justice to them you should remember that these men’s grandfathers cut off their own grandfather’s heads.”

“They prefer, I suppose, a person like Bianca.”

“Of course, a million times.”

“It’s nothing to Clémentine’s credit then that she’s a true friend and incapable of grabbing a man from another woman.”

“No, as long as she dresses like a futurist picture, and carries paper bags through the streets and dines with Ludovic at Voisin’s, she’s a horrid thorn in their sides.”

“Well, I’m sorry, because you know I don’t propose to stop going about with her.”

“Lord, no, why should you? You certainly deserve a bit of fun. Come to the Mouse Trap tomorrow night. We’ve a supper party after the Russian Ballet.”

But I knew what that meant, a troup of theatrical people, and every one drunk by morning, so I declined. I saw a good deal of Fan these days, but she had certain friends I _couldn’t_ see. It didn’t amuse me to watch women get tipsy. Those Montmartre parties depressed me horribly. And I felt sure of Clémentine and her band on this point. It was just one of the admirable things about them that they could be so daringly gay and never verge on the rowdy. I had seen her administer a snub to a hiccoughing youth. She could be terrible when she was displeased, and whatever one said of her, for that matter whatever she herself felt, no one could get away from the fact that she was as proud a lady as any in France, and perfectly conscious of her privilege of caste. It was just this consciousness of her lineage, I imagined, that gave her such a sense of security. She knew that she could do anything she chose and be none the less privileged for it, and actually none the worse. If she touched pitch she knew it wouldn’t stick to her fingers. If she dipped into Bohemia, she did so knowing that she could never be said to belong there. There was always behind her a solid phalanx of relatives who would never disown her however much they disapproved. Always in her maddest escapades there were the towers of the family castle looming behind her. They cast an august shadow. She might dress like an artist’s model, never would she be taken for one. She was safe, perfectly safe and she knew it, and so did every one else.

But with me, as Aunt Clothilde pointed out, it was different.

“There’s nothing to prove what you are but the way you behave, my poor Jane. If Clem took it into her head to play at being a barmaid, the de Joignys and all the rest of them would wring their hands and call it a scandalous idiocy, but if you did the same thing they’d say, ‘Of course, it’s quite natural, she probably was a barmaid in her own country,’ and they wouldn’t wring their hands at all, they’d be mightily pleased.”

“So they think my associating with Ludovic is proof of a low mind?”

“Well, what do you find in that old bourgeois?”

“I find a gold mine.”

“A gold mine of what?”

“Information, ideas.”

“Humph!”

“But it’s true, Aunt, he is educating me. He gives me books, philosophy, history, all sorts of books, then we discuss them.”

“Just like going to school, eh?”

“Very much like that.”

“And it doesn’t bore you?”

“On the contrary.”

“Well, no one will ever believe you. If Philibert comes back, he certainly won’t.”

She broke off and looked at me closely.

“Ah ha, you still care for him, then?”

“No, no, how could I, I mean how could he? It’s impossible that he should return now, surely.”

A week later I found a note from him on my breakfast tray, announcing his return. He was installed in his own rooms in the west wing of the house, and he would “present his duties” at the hour I chose to name. And the post that same morning brought me a letter from Bianca. It said--

“If you blame me for taking away your husband, it is stupid of you. I did you a great service in doing so. Perhaps that was why I did it. I can think of no other reason. For myself I regret it, but not for you. I envy you. Bianca.”

My fingers trembled as I read this strange epistle, and I felt cold. Actually--it seemed as if the room had gone cold as ice.

VI

It seemed at first as if Philibert’s return were going to make very little difference to me. For some weeks I was scarcely aware of his presence in the house. There was plenty of room for us to live there without running into each other. When we did meet at the front door or on the stairs, his manner was marked by just that formal courtesy that was the usual sign of deference from a man of his world towards his wife. To the servants, there was always one or two present at such encounters; there could have been visible no flaw in his armour, nor in mine.

Our first meeting had been brief. Whatever his intention in seeking me out in my boudoir, it took him not more than five minutes to find out that there was nothing to be gained by a prolonged conversation, and on the whole, nothing to be feared from me, did he but leave me alone, but I imagined that I read upon his face more disappointment than relief. He had not been afraid, perhaps just a little uneasy, but he had been curious. He had expected something, and as he left me the expression of his back and the vague fumbling of his hand in the tail pocket of his coat, gave me the impression that whatever it was he had wanted, he was going away without it. This impression, however, was fleeting, a deeper and more painful one remained, and kept me a long time idle at my desk. He was changed in a way that for some subtle inexplicable reason had made me ashamed to look at him. There was in his pallid puffy face, in the sag of his shoulders and the crook of his knees, something that I did not want to understand, something that he had no right to show me. Inside his immaculate clothes he was shrivelled to half his size. His wonderful padded coat sat on him as if on a lifeless and flaccid dummy out of which had escaped a good deal of the sawdust stuffing. Bianca had done with him. She had worn him out. He looked old. His eccentric elegance no longer became him. It was as unsuccessful as a plastered make-up on the face of an old woman. That was the sharpest impression of all, he looked a failure. I wondered that he had the courage to show himself, not to me but to Paris, where he had always walked with such impudent assurance. His showing himself to me seemed to me not half so daring. It seemed to me to prove once more and finally his complete contempt for my opinion.

I went on with my life. If I found that the savour had gone out of it, I did not admit this all at once to myself. The situation didn’t bear thinking about. If one thought about it one would be likely to find it quite extraordinary enough to upset one’s mentality, and I proposed not to be upset by it, and Philibert, apparently, with a certain exercise of tact that reminded one of a burglar arranging the furniture and putting out the lights after ransacking a room, made things as easy for me as he could, by, as I say, keeping out of my sight. I soon found, however, that he wasn’t keeping out of other people’s. On the contrary, I began to be conscious of him moving about near me among his friends. It was really rather funny. Only at home under the roof that housed us both, was I quite free from him. In other people’s houses I was constantly meeting his shadow. He had either been there, or was coming, occasionally I was certain, that he had but just taken his departure as I came in. Something of him remained in the room. I caught myself looking about for his hat, and the faces of my acquaintances betrayed varying shades of discomfiture or amusement. Mostly I gathered as time went on, was their feeling one of amusement. Paris had not been at all squeamish in welcoming Philibert, and it found our continued _chassé-croisé_ rather ridiculous. But with its very special adaptibility and its extraordinary flair for situations, it continued to be tolerant of my evident absurd wish not to be coupled with my husband, and did not ask us out together.

Aunt Clothilde, sitting enthroned like some comic Juno above the social earth, put an end to this. As was her habit she sent for me and barged into the subject in hand.

“Now then, Jane, this sort of thing must stop.”

“What sort of thing, Aunt?”

“You and Philibert playing hide and seek all over Paris like a couple of silly children. Don’t pretend you don’t understand. You chose your ‘_parti_’ long ago when you didn’t insist upon a separation, so now you must go through with it. Nothing is so stupid as doing things half way. You’ve ignored his behaviour. You’ve not bolted the door in his face, and to all appearances you’re a reunited couple.”

I tried to interrupt.

“Don’t interrupt me. I don’t care, and nobody cares what goes on between you and Philibert in your private apartments. Whether you’re nasty or affectionate is nobody’s business but your own, but as regards society, society expects people in it to behave in a certain way, and to make things easy and agreeable and smooth. That’s its main object, its only _raison d’être_. We people who think ourselves something are nothing if we’re not well bred, that is, if we don’t know how to help other people to keep up the pretence that every one is happy, that life is harmonious and that there’s nothing dreadful under the sun. Society, French society, is very intolerant of bad manners, not as you know of anything else. It is exclusive with this object and adamant on this point. It let you in, now it expects you to behave. You’ve enjoyed its favour, you owe it something in return. What a bore to lecture you like a school-mistress, but there you are. I’m going to give a dinner and you and Philibert are both to come, and that will be the end of this nonsense.”

And of course I did as she said.

And again your mother’s manner to me conveyed a sense of my action having made a difference, but this time an enormously happy difference. She beamed, she was more affectionate than she had ever been. She called me “_Ma chère petite_” “_Ma fille aimée_.” Drawing me down to her with her delicate blue-veined hand, she would press her lips to one of my cheeks then the other, lingeringly, and with a pathetic trembling pressure, and look from me to Philibert with happy watery eyes in which was no scrutiny or questioning. She was growing old. Something of her fine discernment was gone. She was no longer curious to know what lay behind appearances. It was enough for her to have recovered her son and been spared the sight of his ruin. Like a child she clung to Philibert. I admit that his manner to her was very charming. He went to see her, I believe, every day.

Claire did not seem so pleased with our renewed family life that resembled so curiously the life we had lived round your mother five years before. Her smile was bitter, her tongue caustic, but she looked so ill, that I put her temper down to bad health. It was, strangely enough, Philibert who explained to me, driving home from his mother’s one Sunday afternoon.

“You mustn’t mind Claire,” he began. “She is in trouble.”

“I don’t. I can see she is in wretched health.”

“Her health is the result, not the cause, of her unhappiness.”

“Oh?”

“Her husband has fallen into the hands of a scheming woman who wants to marry him. He has threatened Claire with a divorce.”

I was taken aback. I stammered. For an instant I wanted to laugh, but Claire’s haggard face was after all nothing to laugh at. I remarked mildly; “But I thought that in your world one didn’t divorce?”

“He’s not of our world, never was, never will be. Besides, it bores him, he’s had enough of us.”

“I see.”

“He’s had too many snubs. We’ve been stupid. That affair of the Jockey Club rankles.”

“You mean that if you had taken him into the Jockey Club ten years ago he wouldn’t want to divorce your sister now.”

“Quite possibly. It would have involved him in other things, given him something to live up to. As it is, he has, as you know, gone in for politics.”

“No, I didn’t know. I never hear him mentioned. I’m very sorry if Claire is unhappy about it.”

“She is, terribly.”

“But she hates him.”

“Not quite that. In any case the disgrace would kill her. She has always been a retiring protected creature. The publicity would be peculiarly awful for her.”

I knew that what he said was true, but he had more to say, and he stammered over it.

“We thought that you, Jane, might do something.”

I was startled. “Do something?”

“Yes, to help, to persuade the man not to.”

“But I scarcely know him.”

“He has a great respect for you.”

“For me? What nonsense.” I looked at him sharply. “What do you mean, Philibert?”

His pale blue eyes turned from mine to the Sunday pageant of the Champs Elysées.

“He wants a place in the Government. He would be greatly influenced by political considerations, a prospect of success. Your friend Ludovic could do something there.”

“You mean that you want me to ask Ludovic to ask the Premier to give your brother-in-law a place in the Cabinet on condition he doesn’t bring divorce proceedings?”

“It needn’t be a big place, you know. An under-secretaryship would do.” The car drew up, came to a stop. “You’d better talk to Blaise about it before you decide to leave Claire in the lurch.”

But you showed a curious reluctance to discuss the question and referred me to Clémentine. I found her in the disused stables behind her house where she had fitted up a studio. She was in a linen overall, her arms smeared with clay, a patch of it on the tip of her tilted nose, her hair screwed untidily on top of her ugly attractive head. She pointed out a clean spot on a packing case and after lighting a cigarette I sat down there.

“I’ve come about Claire.”

“I know.” Her face twinkled. She gave a laugh and taking up a handful of wet clay slapped it on the side of the gargoylish head that she was modelling.

“Why won’t Blaise talk to me about it?”

“He doesn’t like their using you in the matter. He has delicacies of feeling.”

“I don’t quite see. He adores his sister.”

“Of course.”

“And is very unhappy about her, as they all are.”

“Naturally.”

I pondered. “After all, I belong to the family.”

“Quite so, whether you like it or not.” She ducked about scraping and smoothing with flexible thumb.

“But I’m fond of them.”

“Of Claire?”

“Yes.”

“People are.”

“You sound very dry.”

She gave a poke to her ugly old man’s protruding eye.

“_Mon dieu_, I’m not too fond of your family, as you well know. They bore me. I was brought up with Claire. We know each other.”

“You don’t like her.”

“She is uninteresting, no courage, no character.”

“She has put up with a great deal.”

“Has she? She liked her husband’s money, you know, and he’s not a bad sort, really, merely vulgar, quite good-natured.”

“She loves her children,” I said weakly. At that Clémentine looked round quickly.

“Do you call that a virtue?” she asked.

I stammered. “I don’t know, I suppose so. It seems to me human.”

“Well, my dear, when humanity has nothing more to recommend it than the fact that it cares for its young, I shall be ready to depart to another planet.” She sat down on a high stool, one knee over the other, a foot hung down, dangling a shabby shoe. Her face was full of merriment. She chuckled. Her eyes danced. She gave me, as she always did, the impression of containing in herself an immense fund of interest and gladness and of finding life much to her taste.

“You mustn’t destroy my belief in my love for my child,” I said, half laughingly.

“Your belief in it?” She wondered.

“Yes, in its being--worth something.”

“To which one?”

“To us both.”

She puffed at her cigarette. “If I had had a child I should have loved it terribly, and stupidly,” she said seriously. “I should probably have been worse than any of you. Maternity is a blinding, devouring passion, is it not? I don’t know, but so I imagine. A mother’s love for her child, what is there more admirable in that than in any other fact of nature? Only when it is strong, so terribly strong as to become wise and unselfish is it interesting. Even then, no, it is not interesting, it is only natural and necessary, and often, very often, it is a curse to the children.” Her face had gone dark and intense. She jumped down from her stool, gave herself a shake, laughed, turned to her work--“No, your mother-women are dreadful. I prefer those who love men. Sexual passion is good for the feminine soul. It makes us intelligent. Tell me, is it true that in America sensuality is considered a bad thing?”

“Yes. We--they--admire chastity, purity.”

“How do you mean--purity?”

“One man for one woman, love consecrated by marriage.”

“All one’s life?”

“Yes.”

“How strange. Love, you say, consecrated by marriage. How very funny. You mean then seriously, not just social humbug? In their hearts do intelligent women, women like yourself, feel love, love as the interest and savour of life, coming unexpectedly, perhaps often, to be a bad thing?”

“Many do.”

“And you--what do you think?”

“I? Oh, for me, I can’t generalize about it. I have no ideas on the subject.”

“I see.”

She was silent a while. I watched her clever thumbs pressing and smoothing the soft clay. She was no sculptor, but the head she was modelling had a mischievous ugliness. Though badly done, it expressed something. Watching her I realized again her immense capability, her command of herself, her understanding of the elements of life. What was she thinking of now, her sensitive witty face blinking sleepily with half-closed eyes like a cat’s? Inwardly I felt that she was faintly smiling at some pleasant memory or prospect. She was neither young nor beautiful. Her wiry little person suggested nothing voluptuous or alluring. She was dry and spare and untidy, yet her success with men was unequalled. Impossible to imagine her in an attitude of amorous tenderness, yet men adored her. And her lovers remained her friends. She puzzled me. There was something here that I would never understand. The high game of sex as a life occupation of absorbing interest and endless ramifications, a gallant and dangerous sport at which one became a recognized expert, in some such way I felt that she looked at it. As an Englishwoman gives herself up to hunting, I reflected, and exults in knowing herself to be a hard rider, just so Clémentine would go at the biggest jumps, keep in the first field. Riding to hounds or playing the daring game of love, the same sporting mentality, the same ecstatic sense of life, all our faculties sharpened by danger. Why not? Clémentine was sane, healthy, full of zest and delight. Impossible to think of her in terms of maudlin sentimentality or sordid secret pleasures. And yet for myself, I felt a loathing of men, a disgust at the vaguest image of the contacts of sex. It was very puzzling. There must be some deep racial difference between us, or some tenacious effect of my upbringing that held me in a vice, or was it only that Philibert had poisoned for me the sources of all emotion?

I moved about the dirty studio, brought back my mind to the subject I had come to discuss. “We have forgotten about Claire, haven’t we?”

“Well, yes, what of Claire?” She yawned.

“Philibert says that Ludovic could arrange it.”

“No doubt he could. The President of the Council is you know his greatest friend.”

“Yes, I know, but surely giving away secretaryships--”

“Oh, la la! Why not? Don’t worry about that. Madame de Joigny’s son-in-law will make quite a respectable under-secretary as far as that goes. I only wonder he’s not got what he wanted long ago.”

“What shall I do then?”

She looked at me, her head on one side, screwing up her clever mischievous eyes.

“That, my dear, depends entirely on what you want to do.”

“Do you think Ludovic would mind my approaching him on such a subject?”

She laughed. “Do you?”

“No, I don’t. I should put it quite brutally, he would only have to say no.”

“Quite so.” She continued to watch me with her funny intelligent grin.

“And that wouldn’t spoil our friendship, would it?” I asked again.

“No, I should say not, certainly not.” She laughed again and somehow, frank as was that bubbling sound, I didn’t like it coming in at that moment.

“Why do you laugh?” I asked, looking at her keenly.

Her face grew gradually grave, her eyes opened. We stared at each other and in hers I saw a light, a flash, something keen and swift and bright that made me warm to her, value her, exult in her friendship.

“_Vous êtes--vous êtes--_” she turned it off, waving a handful of clay. “_Vous êtes admirable._” But I didn’t understand then, only long after. I wonder what Claire would say if she knew that her fate hung on the thread of Clémentine’s charity? For Clémentine saw it all, saw quite clearly her opportunity for revenge. She had only to suggest what they, unknown to me, were all thinking, namely that Ludovic, for the simplest of reasons, would never refuse me anything, and their whole little scheme would be undone. But she didn’t suggest it. There was nothing spiteful in Clémentine.

So I went to him and told him the whole thing quite bluntly, and he, without any fuss or without giving me any feeling of doing me a favour, said that of course he would put in a word with the Premier. They, he and the Premier, were going to the country together for a few days. They were going to see Ludovic’s mother in her little farm on the Loire. They would fish and sit in the garden. Perhaps over their fishing rods on the banks of the lazy, reedy river, something could be arranged. He then went on to tell me of his mother, who was very old, nearly eighty-five, and who would not come with him to Paris because of the noise. She was, he said, just a peasant woman, and had no interest in his career. But she sent him baskets of apples from her orchard and socks that she had knitted. She could not write. The _curé_ kept him informed of her health. They had been very poor. As a child he had always been hungry and he and his mother had worked in the fields. Sometimes they had been so poor that they had had to beg for bread. His father, who had been of a different class, had done nothing for him. He had made his own way. The _curé_ had taught him to read and write. His mother was content now. She had a cow and pigs and chickens, an apple orchard and a garden. But she could not accustom herself to having a servant in the house and did the cooking herself. He did not allude again to Claire’s husband, neither then nor later. In time, as you know, the matter was arranged, and I like to think that it was settled in that _chaumière_ where Ludovic’s little old mother in her white cap and coarse blue apron sat knitting, while the hens scratched and cackled beyond the farm door. There is something humorous to me in the fact that Claire’s luxurious home was secured to her in that place of poverty and courage and contentment.

In the meantime Philibert had recovered his health and his looks. His doctor and his masseur and his hairdresser and his tailor had in six months restored to him a very good substitute for youth. He had gone at the business methodically and with the utmost seriousness. Seeing as little of him as possible at home, I nevertheless was aware of what was going on. He lived by a strict régime. His rubber came every morning at eight o’clock, his fencing master at nine. At ten he dressed. At eleven he walked or rode in the _bois_. Faithfully he stuck to the diet his doctor had ordered for him. He drank only the lightest wine. He gave up smoking. His hand no longer shook. His face was smooth and rosy, he had put on weight, he walked with his old springy impudence. He looked almost the same, almost, but not quite. No beauty doctor on earth could wipe away from his face the mark Bianca had put there. The droop of the eye-lids, the sag of the lower lip, gave him away. To the crowd he might seem the same Philibert, the leader of fashion, the joyous comedian, the perennially young, but not to me, and not to himself. We both knew that he was an old man now, and this fact formed a sort of bond between us, a cold, grim, precise understanding that linked us inevitably together. And for a time I didn’t quite hate this because I felt secure, I felt that I had the upper hand. He was afraid of me, and in a curious way depended on me. He depended on me, not to give him away, not to let on to any one that he was, or had been, in danger of breaking up. His vanity thus kept him at my mercy, while another part of his brain found relief in the fact that I saw him as he was. Sometimes I caught a look in his eyes that seemed to say--“I really wouldn’t have the endurance to sustain this enormous bluff if I had to bluff you as well.” I never answered his look. I couldn’t bring myself to reach out to him in even the most impersonal way. All I could do was to remain there beside him, in public sharing his life, in private withdrawn, impassive, stolid, non-committal, and do him no harm.

And so it might have gone on indefinitely, the atmosphere of our house coldly harmonious, calm as an icy lake, had not Jinny introduced an element of hot, surging, dangerous feeling.

He loved her, too. At first I wouldn’t believe it, but I was bound at last to admit that it was so. When I first began to notice the increasing attention he gave her I had thought that he was “up to something.” I suspected him to be playing the part of devoted father with motives that had to do with myself, and as I could not conceive of his wanting to make me like him, I imagined the reverse, that he wanted to make me jealous, and I set myself to conceal from him the fact that he had succeeded. I was terribly jealous, for whatever the meaning of his apparent feeling for her, there was no doubt of her affection for him. The child was obviously delighted to be with him. Repeatedly when I asked her if she would like to go with me for a drive, she would ask if “Papa” were coming too, and when I said no, her face would change from pleasure to a curious expression of boredom that was like an absurd imitation of his own. She would turn away quickly and put out her hands to the empty room in a funny, hurting gesture of exasperation, then suddenly, feeling my disappointment, would assume a polite cheerfulness and say, with a quick, tactful insincerity that reminded me all too vividly of her grandmother, “It is a pity Papa cannot come, but of course, Mamma, I like best being with you alone.” And I would cry out in my heart, “My poor, precocious infant, where did you get such intuitions?”--but I knew where she got them.

There was between them a very striking resemblance. I looked sometimes with horrid fascination from one to the other. She would come in with him, swinging to his hand, twirling about, clasping it in both hers, and laughing up in his face. Her light, exaggerated grace was his, also the fineness of her little features. No one would ever at first sight take her for my child, no one seeing them together could mistake her for his. They disengaged the same brightness, the same chilly, sparkling charm. How was it that in one it displeased me and in the other so tormentingly appealed? Why, I asked myself, did I not hate her too, since she so resembled her father? But the muttered question was answered only by an inaudible groan. I had given him all my love, and had now transferred it all to her, a stupid, elemental woman, I felt that I was destined to be their victim. Strange thoughts, you will say, for a mother to have about her child. Why not? I was afraid of her, far more afraid than I had ever been of him. In the days of his power over me I had been young, ignorant, insensitive; now I knew what I was capable of suffering, knew only too well what little Geneviève could do to me, did she take it into her head to become as like him as she looked.

I tried to hide all this, but I felt that he saw. His manner changed. He was at once more attentive to me and more careless, less formal, more talkative, in a word more sure of himself. He took to dropping in on me in the evenings before dinner, bringing Geneviève with him and holding her beside him in the crook of his arm, while he unconcernedly chatted, and all the while her great shining brown eyes were fixed on me with their meaning lucidity. I was obliged to prevaricate, to seem pleased, to lay myself out in an elaborate assumption of happy intimacy.

One night she came running back alone after going with him to the door of his room, and threw her arms round my neck. I gathered her close. Her caresses were so rare that I held her, positively, in a breathless delight, with a sense of yearning tenderness so exquisite that it frightened me. “So sweet, so sweet,” I murmured to myself, straining her to me. Then I heard her say intensely, “It’s not true, it’s not true, tell me it’s not true.”

I lifted my face from her curls.

“What is not true, my darling?”

“That you and Papa don’t love each other.” She kept her face buried. I felt her heart beating against me, a frail little gusty heart beating painfully. The room round us was very still, too still, no sound in it, only the felt sound of our heart beats, and the clock ticking on the mantelpiece. I must speak, I must lie to her, and as the words left my lips I knew that they were involving me in endless deceptions, in a long, long ghastly comedy, in countless humiliations.

“No, darling, it’s not true.”

Her little arms tightened round my neck.

“They said--” she whispered.

“Who said, my pet?”

“Some ladies. I heard them talking. They said, they said you would never forgive him.” I felt her body trembling, and I too trembled, and as I realized that I had thought her incapable of intense feeling I felt deeply ashamed. “What did they mean, Mamma, tell me, what did they mean?”

“Nothing, nothing.” I must have spoken harshly. “They were mistaken, they were speaking of some one else.”

She lifted her face then and looked at me, her eyes were wide and accusing. “Oh, no, Mummy, they said your names, they said Jane and Philibert, your two names. It was at Aunt Claire’s. Dicky and I were just behind the door, and I pulled him away so he wouldn’t hear any more, but he only laughed at me and said, ‘Every one knows your parents detest each other’--in French, you know, ‘_Tout le monde sait que tes parents se détestent_,’ and then I kicked him.”

“Jinny!”

“I only kicked him a little. It didn’t hurt. I wanted it to hurt, dreadfully.”

“My child, my child.”

“I know, Mummy, that it was very wicked. I told Father Anthony all about it at confession, and he looked so sad, so beautifully sad. I wept and wept. He told me to pray very hard to the Virgin to save me from angry passions, and I did, but I enjoyed being angry. I felt big and strong when I was angry, quite, quite different from ordinary, and I thought you would understand. Were you never angry when you were a little girl?”

“Yes, darling, I was.” Her question had startled me. I was profoundly disturbed by this sudden revelation of her character.

But again her little mobile face had changed.

“You aren’t like that, are you, Mummy? You couldn’t be?”

“Like what, my darling?”

“Unforgiving.” Her eyes were on mine.

“I hope not, Geneviève.” She flushed at my tone, but continued to look at me gravely and steadily.

“I thought you might have been angry with Papa for leaving us for so long,” she said with an air of great wisdom. “I was, but I forgave him at once.” I smiled.

“You see,” she went on, “I couldn’t bear him to be unhappy, for I love him.”

“I know, darling.”

“And you love him, too?”

“Of course.”

She heaved an immense sigh.

“Then we are all happy.”

“We are all happy,” I echoed.

A minute later she was at the door, wafting me a gay little kiss. I had not been able to keep her. She was not more than ten years old at that time, but even then she was already the complete elusive creature of swift fleeting moods and superlatively lucid mind that she is today.

And still I suspected Philibert of playing the part of adoring father in order to make me do what he wished. So without alluding to Jinny, never, in fact, daring to allude to her, I tried to bribe him. He had hinted occasionally about wanting to resume our old habits of entertaining, and his hint had shocked me. Such a farce had seemed altogether unnecessary. Now I gave in to him and the same old extravagant theatrical life began. To me it was incredibly boring and at times quite ghastly. There were moments when it was as if over the old sepulchre of our married life he had built an enormous and hideous altar to some obscene heathen deity, some depraved Bacchus before whom he and I giddily danced, with vine leaves in our hair.

“But,” I argued, “this is what he likes, and if I help him do it he will have got from me all that he wants, he will leave Jinny alone. He will have less time for her and will forget about her.” Unfortunately all these social antics took up as much of my time as his. The result was that neither of us saw the child save in hurried snatches, and in that horrible house, now so constantly filled with people, with armies of servants, and streams of guests, I had a vision of her skipping about like a little white rabbit in a monstrous zoo. Poor Jinny, what a wretched mess we made of her childhood, Philibert and I, with our constant vigilant, yet inadequate, lying to each other in her presence, and our ridiculous absorption in the tawdry pageant of society. And yet we both loved her and were doing it, even he in his way, for her. He wanting her to have an incomparably brilliant position in the world, I wanting to keep him away from her, thinking in my jealous stupidity that she would belong more to me the more he belonged to the world.

It was when she fell ill that I was at last convinced of his caring for her. She had pneumonia, you remember, and was very near death for three days. I can see Philibert now, sitting through the night by her bed, he on one side, I on the other, I can see his face as he watched her painful breathing, a face clammy with sweat, contracting suddenly in a curious grimace when she struggled for breath. He never touched her. He left that to me and the nurses. But he never once took his eyes off her swollen little face. I was deeply impressed by the sight of that fidgety, nervous man sitting so still, hour after hour, and I remember his sobbing when the child’s breathing grew easier and the doctors said the crisis was past. Poor Philibert, with his arms thrown across the foot of Jinny’s bed and his head on them, sobbing like a child, I felt very sorry for him that night.

But it was too late for Jinny’s illness to make any real difference in our relationship. We had gone too far, I knew him too well. All that I could do was add to my knowledge of him the fact that he loved his child and leave it at that.

VII

The years passed, crowded with incidents, colourful, varied, gay. I saw them going by, like gaudy pleasure boats, richly panoplied and filled with graceful merry-makers, floating down a sullen river. Sometimes I seemed to be alone, watching them go by, sometimes, beyond them, a long way off, I heard a sound that was like the sound of waves breaking on a distant beach.

You wince at what you feel to be my poor attempt at poetic imagery--I am not trying to be poetic, I am trying to express to you my experience, as precisely as possible. It was like that. In the middle of a crowded place, at the Opera where women in diamond tiaras nodded from padded cages, on the boulevards where a thousand motors like shining beetles buzzed in and out of rows of clanging trams, in a drawing-room ringing with staccato voices, I would find myself, suddenly, listening to a sound that seemed to come from an immense distance; a faint far rhythmic roar that was audible to my spirit, and that I translated to myself in terms of the sea because it affected me that way, like a booming murmur, regular as the booming of waves. I knew what it was.

I seemed at such times to see Patience Forbes, standing on the other side of the Atlantic, like some allegorical figure of faith, a gaunt weather-beaten old woman, her strong feet planted firmly on the shore, the wind whipping her black clothes about her, her brave old eyes looking out at me, under shielding hands, across that immense distance.

The distance between us was growing greater. I no longer wrote to her every week. There seemed so little to say. I found a difficulty in telling her of my occupations and amusements. When it came to describing to her the people I associated with, they appeared suddenly trivial and peculiar. There was no one about me, whom she could have understood. Clémentine with her genius for amorous-adventure, Ludovic with his nihilistic philosophy, Felix the intellectual mischief-maker; when I wrote to her of these people, I found that I misrepresented them, made up for them colourless characters that did not exist and would not distress her. Her innocence cut her off from us. The recital of my life was like telling a story and leaving out the point. I gave it up, disgusted by my feeble insincerity, and limited my letters to news of Jinny and comments on public events. And she understood, of course, that I was keeping everything back. She was no fool. I can see now, when it is too late, what a mistake I made, and what a pity it was. Now that she is dead, I think of her sitting alone in the Grey House, waiting for my letters, opening them with old trembling fingers, reading the meagre artificial sentences; her face growing tired and grim at the meaningless words, then putting away the disappointing sheets of paper in the secretary by the door. I found them there, all of them afterwards arranged in packets with laconic pencilled notes on their wrappers--“Jane doesn’t tell me much. She’s not happy.” “A bad winter for Jane, she’s taken to gambling; she says nothing of her husband.” “Jane was coming but can’t. I’m disappointed.” That note was made the summer Fan died--I had determined to go to St. Mary’s Plains. Fan’s illness stopped me.

I had been seeing very little of Fan. She had established herself in a flat near the _Étoile_ where she lived alone, but where her husband paid her an occasional visit. Ivanoff was pretty well done for in Paris. There had been a scene at the Travellers’ Club, and afterwards his old victims had refused to play cards with him. So he had gone elsewhere. Men like Ivanoff can always pick up a living at Monte Carlo. He spent most of his time there, but when he came back, Fan always took him in. I never saw him on these occasions, nor apparently did any one else, but Fan would announce his arrival bluntly, and with a sort of defiant bravado, would put off her dinners and lunches to be with him.

She lived from hand to mouth. People who accused her of accepting his ill-gotten gains were wide of the mark. Ivanoff contributed nothing to Fan’s keep. It was the other way round. He came back to her when he was on the rocks, came back to beg from her and to recuperate. Once she said to me, “Ivan’s been asleep for thirty-six hours on the sofa in the drawing-room. I swear to you it’s true. He has only waked up twice to eat a sandwich and have a drink.”

But when I asked why she put up with him, she flung off with a laugh, and--“God only knows.”

She lived from hand to mouth in a state of extravagant luxury. Her stepfather had died, leaving her four thousand dollars a year, that gave her twenty thousand francs before the war. One would have said that she spent at the least five times as much, but she didn’t. She had resources, and little arrangements that made it unnecessary for her to pay for a good many things; and she earned a good deal. Her reputation as one of the smartest women in Paris, and her popularity, represented her capital, a very considerable sum. New and ambitious dressmaking houses clothed her for nothing, and in return she brought them the clientele they wanted. She had a standing account at certain fashionable restaurants, where she was allowed to lunch for five francs and dine for ten, and where to “pay back” she was the centre of many a cosmopolitan dinner party. For ready cash she wrote social notes in a fashion paper and occasionally launched a South American millionaire in society. Every one knew about all this; no one minded. She never gave any one away or presumed on her friendships and her frankness about her own affairs which was dry and desperate and funny disarmed criticism.

“My dear,” she said one day to Claire over the tea table, “I’ve had a letter from Buenos Aires from a man who offers me forty thousand francs if I’ll take his wife about next spring, and a five thousand franc tip extra, each time she dines at an embassy. Isn’t it a perfect scream? I wrote back asking for a photo of the wife. It came yesterday. I’ve turned down the offer.”

She borrowed from no one and accepted no gifts of money from her friends, men or women, and I take the last to be the more to her credit because half the people in her world assumed that she did and the other half wouldn’t have blamed her if she had done so. Virtues, that you all held so lightly, have at least a relative value. Fan was incurably extravagant; she adored luxury, and I consider that her having married a poor man, and having refused to procure for herself in a manner so accepted by her world, the ease and comfort she craved, proves her to have been an interesting person. I see that you don’t believe what I say, but I know that it is true. Men did not pay her dressmaker’s bills. As for her little motor brougham that created so much comment, she bought that after an extremely lucky venture in rubber. She gambled on the “Bourse” of course. Old Beaudoin the banker gave her tips. Sometimes he invested her money for her. She would give him a few thousand francs and a month or two later he would perhaps sends her back twice the sum, but it is not exact to say that he always arranged to double her investment. And if he did take her wretched pennies and speculate with them and pretend that he had won when he lost, what harm did that do him with all his millions? It was all by way of repayment anyhow. Fan had got him and his fat wife asked to a lot of nice houses. He owed her far more than he ever paid. And when she crowned her services to him by making his daughter’s marriage, surely she had earned the cheque he sent her or the block of shares, whichever it was.

To have a good time, to be happy, a more sentimental woman would have put it, that was her idea. Who of us all had a better, or a different one? Weren’t we all looking for happiness, always?

Once I saw a street arab playing in the dirt with bits of mica, constantly threatened in his game by horses’ hoofs, wagon wheels, policemen and hooligans. Fan reminds me of him. I remember his tiny eager hungry grimy face, intent on his game. Fan was like him, I watched her playing with bits of worthless brightness in the crowded muddy streets of life, jostled, buffeted, knocked about, a little rickety gutter snipe, fighting for the right to play, that is the way I see her. It had a beauty! you’ll admit that, I suppose.

But we quarrelled. I bored her. She didn’t like having any one about who couldn’t keep up the farce of treating her as the happiest of women, and she made fun of my taking the intellectuals so seriously.

When I wanted to see her I had to go to her flat where luxury and poverty and dissipation and folly were mingled together in an unhealthy confusion. It was a curious place, very bare and new and totally lacking in the usual necessities of housekeeping, such as cupboards and carpets, table linen and blankets, but there were flaming silks thrown about, and a good many books and heaps of soft brilliant cushions. A grand piano stood in the empty drawing-room on a bare polished floor. The dining room table held always a tray of syphons and bottles. There might be no food, there were always cocktails and ragtime tunes to dance to. Sometimes the electric light was cut off because the bill wasn’t paid, but there was a supply of candles for such emergencies, and if creditors were too pressing, Fan would take to her bed and lie under her cobwebby lace coverlet on a pile of white downy pillows all frills and ribbons, smoking endless cigarettes while weary tradesmen rang the door bell, and her friends sat about on the foot of the old lacquer bed telling each other questionable stories, and going off into muffled shrieks of laughter.

Her friends were many and various. Among them were people like Claire and Clémentine and the wife of the Italian Ambassador, but her own small particular set, the group that she went about with most, had its special stamp.

A cosmopolitan lot who had seen better days, and were keeping their heads up, by grit and bluff; they were I suppose the fastest set in Paris. The men didn’t interest me, but the women did, rather. There was something hard and dependable about them that I liked. They bluffed the world but not each other. Their talk was terse and to the point, their language coarse and brutal. They made no gestures and seemed always to be looking very straight at some definite invisible thing that occupied their cold attention. It may have been the ugliness of life that they were looking at. If so, it didn’t make them wince. It may have been the past, if so it didn’t make them shudder or creep. They wasted no time in remorse or regret.

At times they reminded me of tight-rope walkers crossing a dizzy abyss. There was something tense and daring about their stillness, as if a chasm yawned under them. No doubt it did, but it was not their worldly position that was precarious, it was their actual hold on life. They would go on with their old titles and ruined fortunes leading the dance till they dropped, but they might drop any time. People in their entourage did, they were accustomed to violence. One had had a lover who called her up one morning and shot himself while she listened over the telephone. Another had tried twice to kill herself. Most of them drank and took drugs. Their hard glittering eyes gave out a glare of experience, but their faces were cold, calm, non-commital, and if they were worried by the caddishness of the men they loved, by debts and the torments of passion, they gave no sign and held together and helped each other. For damned souls, they made a good show, and I admired them.

They thought me a fool, however, and made a hedge around Fan, shutting her off from me.

One morning I rushed round to her flat on an impulse. I had had no message from her but a curious feeling of nervousness had bothered me in the night. Some one had mentioned Ivanoff at a dinner table. I had heard the words--“wife-beater”--“card-sharper.”

I found things at the flat in an indescribable state of disorder.

The drawing-room was strewn with the remains of supper. The table had not been cleared. There were broken glasses on the floor, empty champagne bottles about; a puddle of wine, some one had spilled a bottle of Burgundy. The cook opened the door for me. The manservant and Fan’s maid had decamped with the silver leaving word that they had taken it in payment of their two years’ wages. A bailiff was sitting on the sofa. Fan was lying in her room in the dark with a wet towel round her head. She said “Oh, hell!” as I came in and turned her back on me. The room had a curious sickly odour, some drug she had been taking, I suppose. Her clothes lay in a heap in the middle of the floor. The dress was torn, the stockings soiled and stained. I felt sick at my stomach. Fan gave a groan.

“For God’s sake, Jane, go away; I’ve got the most ghastly headache.”

All I could do was settle with the bailiff and help the cook clear up the mess. Fan scarcely spoke all the morning. The telephone kept ringing.

“Tell them I’m ill. Tell them to go to the devil,” she called out. She lay there in a dripping perspiration, the sheets clinging to her thin body. She looked like a corpse fished out of the Seine. Suddenly she sprang up. “Good heavens! what time is it? I’m lunching at the Ritz with the Maharajah’s crowd at twelve thirty.”

She sat with her feet dangling over the side of the bed holding her head in her hands. “My head’s bursting--my head’s bursting. Get me a blue bottle off the shelf in the bath room--six drops--no ten--I’ll take ten. It’s wonderful stuff--wonderful! I’ll be alright. You’re an angel.” She talked in a kind of singing moan, a despairing half-crazy chant. “You’re an angel, Jane--you’re too good for this world. I’ll never be able to pay you. How much did you give that man? Oh God! My head! I wish you hadn’t--leave me alone now. I must get dressed. Those Indians won’t know I’m half under. I’ll be all right if I can find my things. Go along--no--no--I don’t want any more help. Ivanoff was here last night; he went off at three this morning. I don’t know where he’s gone; they played chemmy. He won fifty thousand francs from that boy of Adela’s--that baby. I made a scene; I made him give it back. He knocked me down afterwards. He won’t come here again. Anyway he’s gone for good this time. If you ever speak to me of this, I’ll go mad. Leave me alone now. You won’t tell me what you paid that man, but I hate you to pity me, and you’re an angel--you’d no right to interfere. Do for heaven’s sake leave me alone now. God! what a world!” She tottered to her bathroom, trailing her lace nightgown after her. It hung by a ribbon to her bruised shoulder. She shut the door. I heard her turn on her bath. I went away. She avoided me for weeks after that.

Bianca had come back to Paris; she had been, so gossip related it, travelling about Spain with a famous matador. Some people said she had joined his troupe disguised as a boy and had, more than once gone into the arena in a pink suit embroidered in silver and had planted once, the banderillas, in a bull that had five minutes later run his horns through her paramour. I neither believed nor disbelieved the story. José had seen her in the Stand at Seville looking marvellous in a lace mantilla, a black dress high throated and a string of pearls which she flung to the popular hero. She had been wild with excitement, had stood up in her box and called out, and had torn her pearls from her neck with twenty thousand delerious Spaniards shouting round her, and Bombazelta III the Matador on his knee before her, beside the carcase of his victim. Why shouldn’t she have gone a bit further? She liked danger. She could look the part. Actually, I did see a picture of her; three cornered hat, slim tight jacket and breeches, embroidered cape. It suited her, of course; she had the body of a boy, and Bombazelta III was a peculiarly striking man. His photograph was in all the Spanish papers. I found them lying about the library in Paris. Philibert must have sent for them. His nervousness during those days betrayed his interest. Though he never mentioned Bianca’s name, I knew that he was still in touch with her, that they wrote to each other, that he followed her movements. It did not surprise me, when during that summer he went for a week to Saint Sebastian, he called it Biarritz, but I knew where he was. It was Philibert’s behaviour on his return that made me think the stories of Bianca’s sensational caprice were true. Besides, it was just the kind of thing to amuse her for a time.

I wasn’t interested. I didn’t want to know anything about her. All that I wanted was never to see her again. But she had no intention of leaving me alone. Her bullfighter dead, she came back to Paris. Paris is a small place. The community in which we lived was crowded, cramped, intimate. Every one was constantly meeting every one else. Bianca stepped back into her place in it as if nothing had happened. Except for the fact that we were not asked to meet one another at lunch or dinner, one would have supposed that our acquaintances were unaware of our having any reason to dislike each other. The inevitable happened. A newly appointed ambassador gave one of his first dinner parties and found no better way of making it a success than having us both present. We sat on either side of a royal guest. Across his meagre chest we eyed each other. Bianca looked much as usual, younger if anything. She had simplified her make-up. Her fine eyelashes now unplastered with black, curled wide from her great blue eyes that looked as innocent as forget-me-nots. Her face was smooth and white. The smallest thinnest line of carmine marked the curve of her lips. Her dress was a piece of black velvet wound round her white body that was immaculate and lovely. She had the freshness of a water lily, and moved through the salons, cool and serene in an attitude of still dreamy detachment, and her curious magnetism emanated from her like a perfume. She drifted up to me after dinner.

“You must talk to me, Jane--” Her voice was cool and concise. “We have important things to say to each other.”

“I have nothing to say.”

She lifted her eyebrows. Her lips curved to a point. She gave a little sigh.

“Why do you lie? You are _très en beauté_, Jane--you are wonderful. Why do you lie?--You know you owe it all to me--”

I turned my back on her but I felt her standing behind me, watching me, her eyes shining, her delicate nose palpitating faintly, her eyes reading me. She had no intention of leaving me alone.

Our next meeting was at Madeleine’s. Madeleine was the woman who looked after my face. Bianca went to her too. I was sitting in front of the dressing-table, my head tied up in a towel, my face plastered with grease, when Bianca came in. She chattered and gossiped and held up the photograph of herself in the costume of the Spanish bull-ring. “I was distracting myself--” she laughed. “I had been bothered by some very curious ideas. You remember our talk at the ‘_Château des trois Maries_.’ Well, that sort of thing. I thought the excitement would help. It did. I was within a yard of the bull when he died. Some of the blood splashed me. I didn’t like that.”

I broke in saying that I didn’t believe a word of it.

“Don’t you, Jane? Well, it’s no matter. It’s unimportant. The important thing is that I’m sick to death of everything. Every one bores me. I find you are the only woman in Paris who is alive. I’ve been watching you--you are very extraordinary. You care for no one. You are self-sufficient. You have achieved the impossible.”

All this time Madeleine was massaging my face and pretending not to be interested. I could say nothing. I boiled with rage, helpless, wrapped in sheets and towels, my face plastered with grease, and Bianca sat there, her little white face buried in her furs and laughed at me. When at last she had gone, Madeleine said the Princess had such a beautiful character.

I felt that I was being bated like one of her famous bulls. I resolved to make no move. I refused to be goaded to an attack. I was afraid of her.

Then one day Fan came to see me. Instead of rushing in with her usual shrill greeting, she walked up to me quietly, put her arm round me and laid her cheek against mine.

“I’m so happy, Jane dear; I’m so happy.” Her voice was gentle. “I have found what I have been waiting for all my life.” She went down on her knees and looked up into my face. Hers was calm and rested and had upon it an expression of sweetness that I had never seen there before. “I’m in love, Jane dear. I’m in love with the most wonderful man in the world. I wanted to tell you because I knew you’d be glad I was happy.”

She stayed with me for an hour and told me all about it. It was the strangest thing, hard cynical Fan, suddenly become young and sentimental and timid. They had met at St. Moritz that Christmas. He was an Englishman, half Irish really, with a strong streak of Celt in him. His name was Mark. She called him Micky. He was very beautiful, as beautiful as a god. He had taught her to ski. They had been together high up on snowy peaks above the world. One day she had fallen and sprained her ankle. He had carried her down the mountain in his arms. He was strong and straight like a young tree. He wanted her to divorce Ivanoff and marry him. He said there was no other way for them to be happy. He wanted to meet me. Would I come to lunch now, right away? He was waiting for us. She had told him all about me.

I went, of course. That boy,--you remember him, and how handsome he was, with his golden head and fresh bronzed cheeks and the long curly eyelashes fringing his blue eyes, and his broad sunny smile. He was too beautiful I had felt until he gave me that very broad smile.

Our luncheon was a happy absurd affair. Those two were ridiculously in love--they behaved like children. They beamed, they blushed, they looked into each other’s eyes, he very shy and sweet and attentive, calling her Fan, and in talking to me trying to be dreadfully solemn. “Please, Madame de Joigny, make her be serious. She must divorce that chap, you know. There’s no alternative. It’s got to be done and I want it done right away. Please back me up. I say, you mustn’t smile, you know. It’s dead serious.”

How could I help smiling? He was very appealing. He rumpled his hair and his eyes grew dark, and little beads of moisture stood out on his high tanned forehead. I looked at Fan. Poor Fan! so much older, so worn, so stamped with the stamp of her harrowing racketing years, and yet a new Fan with a young light in her eyes; I was disturbed and anxious.

My fears seemed during the weeks that followed to be groundless. She held him. They continued their dream of bliss. He satisfied her utterly. It was of course his beauty that she loved. Always she had adored beauty in men--now she had it in its most charming aspect, fresh, clean, young. They had nothing in common, but their passion. He was stupid and rather a prude. He had grown up with horses and dogs and a family of sisters in an English country house, had joined the army and then had gone to South Africa with his regiment. He had ideas about womanliness and the honour of a gentleman and the duties of his class. He had never been in Paris before. Fan found no fault in him.

She began taking him about with her. Society was at first amused and indulgent, then again the inevitable happened. He became the rage. A number of women lost their heads over him. He was invited out without her. Soon he was everywhere in demand, and Fan rightly or wrongly persuaded him to go. This at first quite worried him. Women wanting him for themselves and finding him obstinately faithful, turned spiteful. He didn’t understand, for he wasn’t fatuous, but he must have heard a good many things about Fan that he didn’t like.

I felt for him in a way. It seemed to me that he was holding his own pretty well and behaving on the whole very decently, but I wished that Fan’s divorce could be hurried along. She had hesitated about divorcing Ivanoff. “Of course,” she said, “he lives off women, but I’ve known that all along, and it doesn’t seem quite fair to get rid of him now--” but she had given in, in the end.

The months dragged on. I began to wonder whether Micky would hold out. It had been difficult to find Ivanoff. A long time elapsed before the divorce papers could be served on him.

Micky still stuck to Fan, but he began talking about compromising her and, after a time, I had an impression that he stuck to her grimly, without enthusiasm. I imagined him to be cursing his own weak character. He was weak and he knew it, and so did we. He clung to Fan as a woman should cling to a man. This did not make her despise him, it gave her a feeling of strength and safety. She encouraged his dependence on her and adopted the rôle of guide and counsellor.

About this time I had a telephone message and a note from Bianca; both summoning me to her in her old peremptory style. The message was that the Princess wished to see me on urgent matters and would be at home all that afternoon. I did not go. The note, received next morning was as follows:

“It is silly and dangerous to stand out against me. I am attacked by all the demons you know about and if you don’t come, something unexpected and unpleasant will happen.”

I paid no attention to it.

Fan’s character and the quality of her life changed completely; she gave up going out and sank into the deep secretive isolation of a woman who lives for one man alone. Her other men friends melted away. Many of her women friends dropped her. Not those of her own little band, but Micky didn’t like these. Claire who was fond of her, said--“_Elle se rend ridicule avec ce garçon_,” and refused to have them to dinner together. Fan didn’t seem to care; she stayed more and more at home. This created for her serious money difficulties. She had never had any meals at all to speak of in her own flat, and her butcher’s bill had come to nothing, but now her boy had to be fed. He would come into dinner or lunch nearly every day, rosy and ravenous, and consume large beef steaks, fat cutlets, chickens, eggs, butter, sweets. Her bills became larger as her revenues dwindled. She could or would no longer avail herself of her old sources of wealth. Her vogue was vanishing, and with it the amiability of dressmakers and restaurant-keepers. She had a distaste now for gambling on the Bourse and asking Beaudoin for tips. Micky it seemed disapproved of women gambling. Her love affair was costing her her livelihood; and Micky himself gave her nothing, perhaps because he had nothing much to give; perhaps because of some idea of honour, perhaps because he didn’t know how hard up she was. Fan was not the kind to let on. I know for a fact that she often went hungry to give him a good square meal, and I suspected that under her last year’s dresses, she didn’t have on enough to keep her warm.

It became increasingly evident as the winter wore on that there were influences at work, perhaps a special influence that was worrying them both, but I had no suspicion of the truth. Had I known I would have done something effective--I would have wasted no time with Bianca.

Fan had burned her bridges. There was no going back for her now, no slipping down into the old stupefying pleasures. He had changed her, he had purified and weakened her. There was for her a future with him or nothing. If she lost him, she would be done for. She knew this. She remained clear-headed and played her cards with desperate caution. And I watching her, saw just how frightened she was, but she told me nothing.

I did not know that Bianca knew Micky. She went out very little now. People spoke of her living shut up in her house as they might have spoken of some lurid figure of legend, some beautiful ogress, gnashing her hungry teeth in a cave, but I didn’t listen when they talked of her. I wanted less than ever to hear about her. She still saw Philibert, I knew, but this no longer concerned me. And she seemed to have given up pursuing me. I ought to have known she was up to something. I am sorry now that I refused to think about her, for I might have reasoned it out and discovered by a process of logic, what she was up to--I might have known that she would inevitably choose Micky for her own, just because he was in love with another woman, just because he was the pet of Paris, just because finally, Fan’s life depended on him and because I cared for Fan as if she were my own child.

In March Fan began to lose her nerve. She said to me one day--

“You know that I’m frightened but you don’t know how frightened. Some day, any day, tomorrow perhaps, he’ll see me as I am, a shrivelled-up hag who has played the devil with her life. Do you remember Jane, how your grandmother used to make us read the Bible on Sunday mornings in St. Mary’s Plains? I remember a phrase--‘Born again.’ Well, I’ve been born again. My soul is beautiful, it’s as beautiful as the morning, but I’m as tired and ugly as ever--and my mind is as old as hell. I’ll lose him if I marry him, or if I don’t, I feel it in my bones. I used to think--‘I’m so much cleverer than he is that I’ll be able to keep him.’ My dear, don’t talk to me about cleverness in holding a man. I’d give all the brains in the world for one year of beauty. If only I could be quite quite lovely for just one year. God! but it’s tiring to be always trying to look nicer than you are.”

On another day she broke down and sobbed and implored me to tell her that she was mistaken, and that he wouldn’t get tired of her. “He’s so sweet,” she cried, “so sweet. He gets so cross with women who aren’t nice about me. When they make love to him he doesn’t seem to understand, he thinks them idiots, but each time that he comes back to me from one of them, I am afraid to look at him, afraid to see his eyes, veiled, shifting. It’s awful--too awful! He couldn’t hide anything from me, could he?”

The next time I saw her she was the colour of ashes.

“He hasn’t been near me for a week. Some one has got hold of him. I know who it is.” Her teeth chattered, she kept twisting her hands, but as I sat there miserably watching her, the telephone rang, and she was off like a crazy woman. “Yes, yes, I’m at home, of course. Oh, Micky darling, do--do--come quick, quick”--and when she came back to me she was laughing and crying and saying over and over, “I’m a fool! I’m a fool.”

It was the end of March that they made up their minds to go away together to Italy. She was very lucid and calm about it. Paris had got on their nerves. The life they were leading was impossible. His family might cut him off without a penny, but that couldn’t be helped. They would stay in Italy until the divorce decree was made absolute, and they could be married. Micky had a foolish idea about its being unwise for them to start together from Paris. They were to take the Simplon Express. She was to go ahead and board the train at La Roche Junction. As this was very near Ste. Clothilde, would I mind her going there and stopping the night?

As it happened I was going to Ste. Clothilde for Easter, a few days later, so I advanced the date of my journey and took her with me.

How much she knew or suspected of what had been going on between Micky and Bianca, I do not know. She never told me. All that she ever said was--“I know he didn’t plan it deliberately, I know he didn’t mean to--when I left him.” But she must have known enough to be terribly anxious, and I imagine that her decision to go off with him to Italy was a last desperate move.

The Simplon Express left Paris at nine and stopped at La Roche at eleven o’clock at night. Micky was to take two tickets and the sleepers and get on the train at Paris, ready to lift her aboard.

“Once I am on the train,” she kept saying, “I feel that I will be safe.”

La Roche was a three hours’ motor run across country from Ste. Clothilde, the roads were winding lanes, confusing and indistinctly marked; so we decided that she had better do the distance before dark. She might puncture a tire, the motor might break down, anything might happen, she was feverishly anxious to allow herself plenty of time. She started at three o’clock.

Her face was strained and seemed no bigger than a little wizened infant’s face as she said good-bye. For a moment, on those immense stone steps in view of Philibert’s great formal gardens with their fountains and statues and broad gravel walks, she clung to me. Then with a final nervous hug flung away and jumped into the car. Her last words were “I’ll not come back till I’m married, Jane, so give me your blessing.” And out of my heart I gave it, kissing both my hands to her as the motor swung down the drive, and through the great iron gates.

I felt singularly depressed. Fan and I in that formal and splendid panorama, were such minute creatures--were no bigger, no stronger than a couple of flies. Never had the Château de Ste. Clothilde seemed so cold, so inhuman, so foreign. I no longer disliked the place, I had grown used to it as I had grown used to other things. Its imposing architectural beauty, delicately majestic, serenely incongruous with nature, had made its effect on my mind. I understood to some extent the idea that had created it, the high peculiarity of taste that had chosen to mock at woods and fields, by building in their midst a palace smooth and fine as a thing of porcelain. Gradually I had come to appreciate the bland assurance of the achievement with all its bold frivolous contradictions of reason and common-sense. The moat that surrounded three sides of the château, was like a marble bath. It had no _raison d’être_. Never had any owner dreamed of defending this place from any invaders, but the moat was there, full of clear water, palest green in which were reflected the silvery walls and high shining windows. And on the fourth side of the house, a joke perhaps, or to contradict the chilling effect of the moat, the eighteenth century architect who adored Marie Antoinette in her shepherdess costume, built an immense flight of steps straight across the length of the south façade, lovely, smooth, shallow steps, made to welcome a crowd of courtiers in satins and trailing silks, and dainty high-heeled slippers. It had amused me at times to imagine them there in that theatrical setting, and to recreate for myself the spectacle of their _fêtes galantes_--but on the day that Fan left me to go to her boy lover, I took no pleasure in the ghostly place. The sky was grey, the faintly budding trees marshalled a far-off beyond the formal gardens, showed a haze of green that seemed to me sickly, and the suggestion of spring in the air gave me a feeling of “_malaise_.”

I remembered that Bianca and Philibert had gone off by the same Simplon Express five years before. They too must have stopped at the station of La Roche at eleven o’clock at night, or had they boarded the train farther down the line? I couldn’t remember what they were supposed to have done. All that had nothing to do with me, yet I was waiting for Philibert to arrive with a dozen people who would be my guests, his and mine.

My chauffeur reported his return at nine o’clock that evening. They had reached La Roche at six as planned. He had left the Princess at the station. The Princess had not wished him to wait until the arrival of her train. He had insisted, _auprès de Madame la Princesse_, as I had told him to do, but she had been displeased and had sent him away.

It was a rainy night, loud with a gusty April wind. The big rooms of the château were peopled with moving shadows and filled with whisperings and sighs. The wind moaned down the chimneys and set the far branches of the trees in the park to tossing. I was alone in the house save for the servants. Jinny had gone to her grandmother for a few days.

I slept badly and woke early. My room was scarcely light. The sun was not yet up, or was obscured by a dismal sky. I listened apprehensively to the moaning restless morning. I listened intently for something--a sound, I didn’t know what. Then I heard it. The telephone downstairs was ringing. I knew in an instant what that meant, and flew down the corridor, my heart pounding in my ribs. A clock somewhere was striking six, seven, I did not know which. A man’s voice spoke over the phone,--“_La Gare de La Roche--La Princesse Ivanoff prie La Marquise de Joigny de venir la chercher en auto--La Princesse l’attendra à la Gare--La Princesse s’est trouvée malade dans la nuit et a manqué son train._” I did not wait to hear any more. I was on my way in half an hour. The drive seemed terribly long, interminably long. Fan all night in the station of La Roche--what did it mean?

I found her sitting on a packing case on the station platform, her head against the wall. Her face was bluish, her lips were a pale mauve, her hands, wet, like lumps of ice.

“I’ve been sitting here all night,” she said in a dull voice. “I’m cold.” The station master helped me get her into the car. He seemed troubled and ashamed. He explained that they had not noticed her during the night. After the passing of the express he always went home to bed. The station was deserted during the middle of the night, and the waiting room locked. No passenger trains stopped between twelve and five in the morning. At five the Princess had been discovered by an employé but she had refused to move. They had tried to get her to drink some coffee from the buffet. She had asked him to telephone which he had done. The Princess had told him that she had felt faint during the evening while waiting and had thus missed the train.

On the way home she did not speak. Her body was as heavy against me as a corpse. Her head kept slipping from my arm. I held her across my knees and gave her a sip of brandy now and then. Half way home she began to shiver. Her body shook, her teeth chattered, grating against each other. By the time we reached home, she was in a burning fever.

That night Philibert entertained his guests alone. I sat with Fan in her room. About ten o’clock she stopped for a moment her terrible exhausting tossing from one side of the bed to the other and said--

“I heard her laugh. She put her head out of the car window and laughed.”

“Who laughed, dear?”

“Bianca--she was with Micky in the train. They wouldn’t let me get on. I had no ticket--”

She lay on her back now staring at the ceiling. Some one downstairs was playing a waltz on the piano. The wind had fallen. Out of doors the night was soft and still. Fan’s voice came from her dried lips, distinct and harsh.

“I tried to get onto the steps of the train. The guard stopped me. Bianca must have fixed him beforehand. Micky was drunk. She had fixed him too, by making him drunk. He wouldn’t have done it if he hadn’t been drunk. The railway carriage was very high, but I could see into the lighted corridor. I saw Micky. His face was red and stupid. I called ‘Micky--Micky, my ticket--quick; they won’t let me on without it.’ But he didn’t seem to hear me. Some one was behind him in the compartment.

“The _wagons-lits_ man asked me what I wanted. I screamed out--‘That gentleman has my ticket.’ He half believed me. I saw him go in and speak to Micky, and looking up--you know how high the carriages are--I saw Micky shake his head. The attendant came back then and told me that I was mistaken, the gentleman was expecting no one, there was no place, the car was full. A whistle blew. The train started to move, I grabbed the handle by the steps. The _wagons-lits_ man slammed the door shut above me. The train moved faster, I ran along holding on. ‘Micky’ I called, ‘Micky.’ Some one pulled me back, wrenched my hand loose, I stumbled, then I heard Bianca laugh, I saw her. She put her head out of the window and laughed. I was on all fours, in the wet. It was raining. I scrambled to my feet and ran down the platform. The train was moving fast by this time. The last carriage passed me. I reached the end of the platform. I saw the red light at the back of the train. They were in the train together, Micky and Bianca. They were together, in the little hot lighted compartment. They were going away together. She had taken my place. I stood there. The red light disappeared. There seemed to be no one about, it was very windy and cold. I don’t know what I did after that. I remember the steel rails stretching out under the arc light into the darkness. I wanted to run down the rails and catch the train, but the train was gone, and I was afraid.”

They were dancing downstairs; I heard their feet scraping; the time was changed to a fox trot--but Fan did not notice. She lay in a deep dark empty place of her own, cut off from all the sights and sounds round her, watching something, following something, the red lantern perhaps at the end of a train going away in the dark.

I gave Philibert no explanation of Fan’s presence or of her illness. The other people in the house thought that she had come for a visit and had caught cold during a walk in the rain. I had told my maid to suggest this explanation to the servants. She understood. They did not give me away. Philibert never knew what had happened to Fan, but he found out when he went back to Paris that Bianca had gone away with the English boy. I remember wondering afterwards, how he liked being the one who was left behind, but I wondered vaguely, without any feeling for him. He mattered less than he had ever done. Nothing mattered for the time being but Fan, very ill, with congestion of the lungs, who wanted so much to die and end quickly what was already ended. But she couldn’t manage dying. Death eluded her. Life was unwilling to let her miserable body go. Like the remains of some sticky poisonous substance left in a battered dish, it stuck to her. Unwelcome, noisome, contaminated stuff of life, she couldn’t get rid of it although the convulsing frame tried to eject it from her lips. The horror of her coughing! the shaking of her pointed shoulders, the sound of her wrenching stomach, the rattling of her breath in her poor bony chest, the great deep resounding noises of pain in the fragile box that held her wasted lungs! Her eyes would start out at me in terror. She would clutch at me wildly and gasp--“Hold me. Hold me, Jane, I’m shaking to pieces,” and I would hold her through the long spasm, and then she would fall back exhausted and clammy with sweat. My heart ached and ached and ached. I wanted so, for her to die. If she had asked me to do it, I would have ended her life with an injection of morphine, but she said nothing.

Early in May she had a bad haemorrhage. All the scarlet blood of her veins seemed to me to be staining the cloths that I held to her mouth. And afterwards she lay at peace, and I thought “Thank God this is the end,” but it wasn’t. She rallied. Some strength came back to her. The doctors told me to take her to Switzerland. I did so, and did not remember until we were installed in our chalet near the sanatorium that we were within a few miles of the place where she had first met Micky, but she seemed not to mind at all being there, and would lie on the balcony in the sun looking across the valley at the mountains with a smile on her face, while I read aloud to her. Sometimes she talked of St. Mary’s Plains, sometimes of Paris, a great many people wrote to her, women who had been unkind when she was happy, were sorry for her now; sometimes she was gay, laughing and childishly pleased with new chintzes and tea sets and cushions that I ordered from Paris but she never spoke of Micky.

Gradually she grew smaller and smaller. Her face was disappearing. There was nothing much left of it now, but a pointed nose with painfully wide distended nostrils, and two sunken eyes. I took the hand glass away from her dressing table one night when she was asleep--she didn’t ask for it, but one day not long afterwards, she said suddenly “I would like something, Jane.”

“What, my darling?”

“I would like some new clothes, especially hats. I would like six new hats from Caroline Reboux”; and then she looked at me suspiciously like a sharp little witch.

I said, of course, that I would write for them at once. She dictated the letter. Caroline was asked to send us the newest and smartest models she had. “She knows my style,” said Fan from her pillow, “she’ll send something amusing, won’t she, Jane?”

“I’m sure they’ll be ravishing, my dear.”

“Do you think I’m silly, Jane? I’ve a feeling it will do me good to have those hats--when they come we’ll try them on, we’ll go for a drive. We’ll pick out the most becoming and drive to--but how long will it be before they come?”

“Not more than ten days--I should think,” I said avoiding her strange eager eyes.

The next day she was very tired, she asked if there were letters but only looked at the envelopes, saying--“They don’t care a damn whether I live or die,” and the next day and the next, she asked again for letters only to fling them aside.

In the evening she said, “I’m a beast, Jane--and a fool. Why did we write for those hats? I know I can’t wear them, but I’ve always wanted to order hats like that, half a dozen at a time without thinking what they cost. You won’t mind paying, I know--and I don’t mind now. I’ve been a beast about you, Jane, I used to envy you so many things.”

“What for instance--?”

“Well, your ermine coat with the hundreds of little black tails, the sable cape, and your jade necklace, and your pearls. I always adored pearls. I believe I could have sold my soul for pearls like yours at one time. Funny, isn’t it? Lucky no one ever offered me any--no one ever did you know. I wasn’t the kind to have ropes of pearls given me for the asking. If I had only been beautiful, Jane--I would have gone to the dogs sure as fate, but oh, I’d have had a good time. As it is, I don’t seem to have had much fun, now that I think of it. My past is like a dingy deep pocket with a hole in it somewhere. I’ve been dropping trinkets into it all my life, and now I find it’s empty, just an empty dark pocket--that’s my past.” She gave her old shrill laugh. “It’s damn funny isn’t it, Jane--life, I mean. We go on, hoping, hoping, looking forward, looking for something, thinking always there’s something nice ahead for us, being cheated all the time, never admitting it, never giving in, always expecting--fooling ourselves, being fooled--up to the very end. What makes us like that? What keeps us going? Who invents the string of lies we believe in?”

She lay propped up on pillows, her head sunk between her pointed shoulders, her knees sharp as pegs pushing up the bed-clothes, and her skinny hands like birds’ claws picked at the lace on her sleeve.

“Happiness--Jane? I was happy once, you know. It made me good, at least I thought so. I felt good. I tried to be good. Everything dropped away; it was like moulting. I came out a plucked chicken, no fine feathers left. What was the use? I was too far gone I suppose, when it came--” She stared up at me, her cheek bones flushed, her wide nostrils, great black holes in her small face, palpitating. “Love came--now death--and I’m not good enough for that either. What’s death to me? Nothing. I can’t rise to meet it. I want some new hats. That’s all I can think about, all I can bear to think about. My death Jane, like my life, is empty. I fill up the emptiness with things, little things.” She held her two hands against her side as if the emptiness were there, hurting her. “Jane,” she said suddenly, “I wonder--” Her eyes widened, and in them I saw the shadow of the great terror that gets us all in the end. She stared, her dreadful gaping nostrils dilating, her mouth open, her hands out in front of her, pushing against the air. Then suddenly she laughed. “No, no, damn it all, let’s be frivolous up to the end. It’s as good a way as another of seeing the business through.”

She died the end of July, with all her new hats strewn round the room and a piece of wonderful lace in her hands. “Lovely, lovely lace, isn’t it, Jane?” she had said a minute before, and then there was a tearing sound in her chest and the scarlet blood flowing from her mouth, and one choking cry as I sprang to her side.

“Jane--Jane--I’m going now and I’ve not seen him. Jane, tell him, tell Micky I hoped--” Her eyes were agonized. The blood choked her. She couldn’t speak, but I saw in her eyes what she meant--terribly I saw--how she had believed up to the end that Micky would come back to her.

It was Ivanoff who came and Ivanoff, great hulking shameful pitiable creature who wept over her poor lonely coffin. We brought her back to Paris, Ivanoff and I, and buried her in _Père-Lachaise_ one rainy afternoon and then he disappeared again for the last time.

I went straight to Deauville. Philibert was there with his mother and Jinny, but I went to find Bianca. I had seen in the paper that she was at the Normandy.

I may have been out of my mind, I don’t know. I remember that I thought I had Fan’s disease, but that does not prove that I was off my head. The smell of it was in my breath, the dry sound of its hacking cough in my ears, and constantly I saw before me, Fan herself, pallid, shiny with sweat, two black holes in her face opening, panting for breath--and behind her, looking over her dank head I saw Bianca, her pointed lips smiling, cruel as only she in all heaven and earth could be cruel.

It is true that I took a revolver with me to the Casino that night. I remember putting it in my silk bag and pretending at dinner that I had a lot of gold pieces by me, for luck. I had. I was going to the Casino to gamble. I would find a place opposite Bianca and sit her out. You remember the scene. People talked of it enough Heaven knows. One would have supposed women never had played high before. A crowd gathered round us--half Paris was there. I remember the Tobacco King, a very fat man with a red face. It pleased him at first, he swelled with importance. By three in the morning he had lost five hundred thousand francs. His place was taken by the Brazilian millionaire--Chenal, the opera star, was opposite. A number of men accustomed to playing in the men’s rooms, joined our table. They half realized there was more in it than just a game. Bianca opposite me, was white as a sheet. Her face was like a white moon among all those red bloated faces. I watched her. I watched her long carmine finger nails glinting as she handled her piles of folded notes. We played against each other. The luck was against me after the Tobacco King left. I was losing heavily. The fact made no impression on me. I wasn’t playing with Bianca for money. The little wads of thousand franc notes were symbols. The game was a blind. I went _Banco_ against her as a matter of course, automatically, but all the time I was playing another game. I was repeating silently to myself, words that were meant for her. Your psycho-therapists would say I was trying to hypnotize her, to subject her to my suggestion. Well, I was; I was attacking her brain with all the power of my will. I was concentrated on her to break her down. I was determined to frighten her, to fill her with dread, with frantic dread of my hatred, my loathing, my determination to make her pay for what she had done. I succeeded. At four o’clock she began to show signs; attendants kept bringing her whiskey, liqueurs, champagne; her face had turned blueish, she went on. She was still winning. But she knew now, that that wouldn’t help her. At five I saw her waver. She started to scrape together her winnings. I did the same. She looked into my face; it was evident to her that if she left the table I would follow her. She went on playing. We sat there as you know till six o’clock. We left the Casino as the doors closed--we left together.

“I am going with you, Bianca--don’t hurry, there is no hurry”--I kept her by my side. The sun was rising as we crossed towards the Normandy. “No--” I objected, “not there--come out on the beach.” It was low tide. The sea was still. A light mist hung along the horizon. The little waves glinted in the first sun rays. We went out across the wet sand, Bianca’s turquoise blue cape trailing behind her in the little pools where crabs scuttled out of the way of our high satin heels. The sunlight bathed us. It showed her pallid as a corpse. What I looked to her, I do not know. Our two long shadows moved ahead of us to the edge of the water. There was no one near. Behind us stretched the sands--in front of us the sea--afar out, was a ship, minute white sails, sea birds darted in the blue--space--sunlight--silence. We faced each other, and I told her very briefly what was in my mind. I told her that the earth must be rid of her, at any rate that part of the earth which held me, that I had a revolver in my bag and was quite prepared if necessary to put an end to her life, or give it to her, and leave her to do it herself. On the other hand I saw no particular point in suffering the consequences of her death, and would be content if she disappeared for ever from the world that I knew, from Paris, from France, from the civilized places where ordinary men and women like myself were in the habit of living. I told her that I would not allow her to live anywhere any longer where I was--that she could choose--either she would go--take herself off--disappear for ever--or shoot herself there in my presence--If she didn’t, I would kill her the next time I came across her.

It sounds extraordinarily silly and puerile as I relate this but it did not sound silly to Bianca. You must remember that I knew Bianca and knew just how that sort of thing might affect her--and knew that physically she had always been afraid of me. I counted on her superstition, her morbidness, her lassitude. I counted on the stillness, the wide mysterious dawn, the still sea, the cold sky--and I counted on her lack of character--on her “_manque d’équilibre_.” I was right. I told her that she was loathesome and that at bottom she loathed herself; I told her that she was sick of loving herself and in fact, couldn’t go on much longer even pretending to herself that she wasn’t vile. I told her that her vanity was strained to the breaking point, that any day it might snap and that she would collapse. When she could no longer keep up the fiction of her own interest to herself what could she do? Nothing. She would be a drivelling idiot--she would go insane as she had feared. Coldly I repeated it, over and over. She was diseased; she was a maniac--an egotistical maniac and she would one day become a raving lunatic. She could take her choice. End it now--or go off and develop her lunacy elsewhere in some far country where the curse of her presence would affect no one that mattered to me.

I can see her now--as she was that morning--standing in the sunlight in her evening dress, her feet wet, her cloak trailing on the sand, her face working. I had never seen her face twist before. That morning in the glaring sun, it twitched and jerked and pulled, until almost I thought that her mind had snapped and that she was already the idiot I had prophesied, but she pulled herself together to some extent and managed after a while to speak. What she said was trivial.

“It is your fault, Jane--you wouldn’t do what I wanted so I had to hurt you again--you shouldn’t blame me--you know that I am possessed of devils--Well, have it your own way--I’ll go. Don’t look at me like that--I’ll go, I tell you. Stop looking, you frighten me--Yes, I’m afraid of you--I admit it. Your look is a curse in itself--Wasn’t I cursed enough when I was born--what have I done after all--Fan’s death--? Pooh! She’d have died any way.”

But at that I gripped her. I must have twisted her arms. She gave a shriek, then a whimper as I let her go, and staggered away from me, back towards the shore. I followed her as far as the bathing boxes; all the way she made little noises like a wounded animal, whimpering, sniffing, almost growling. It was horrid. Her long swaying staggering figure, her head hanging forward, her hands twisting her clothes round her, clutching her sides--her shoulders twitching; she was, I suppose, on the verge of hysterics. I felt no pity for her. The sight of her was shocking and disgusting. She had gone to pieces as I thought she would do. She had no character.

I watched her go--From the wooden walk I watched her stumble towards the hotel, break into a run, turn to look back, disappear. It was seven o’clock. An attendant opened a cabin for me. I stripped and swam out--out--a mile, two miles, three, I don’t know. When I got back to the villa Jinny was at breakfast. I felt hungry. We laughed over our honey and rolls. At twelve I was told that Bianca had left Deauville by motor.

That was in 1913, the year before the war.

VIII

Jinny liked to wear silks and velvets when she was quite a little girl. Her taste for pretty clothes was something more than childish vanity. I used often to find her in the room lined with cupboards where my dresses were kept, sitting on the floor amid a heap of soft shining garments, that she had dragged from their hooks, stroking the fabrics lovingly, and purring to herself like a blissful kitten. She couldn’t bear the touch of wool or starched cambric, and screamed herself into hysterics when in obedience to the doctor’s orders, I tried one winter to put her into woollen combinations. Her father humoured her in this. I think it rather pleased him that she should be so delicately fastidious. He found in it a proof of an exquisite sensibility and likened her to the fairy-tale princess of the crumpled rose leaf. Unfortunately he told Jinny the story and she immediately accepted it as illustrative of herself, acted it out literally in her nursery, obliging her nursemaid to make and remake her little bed, to smooth and stroke and smooth again until every imaginary wrinkle in the soft sheets was gone, before she would consent to get into it. This habit lasted for some weeks until she read one day in her “_histoire sainte_” of a saint who had acquired great spiritual blessing by sleeping on the floor of her cell, whereupon she took no more interest in the way her bed was made. The nurse was delighted until she discovered that as soon as she had turned down the light and left the room, Jinny hopped out of bed and lay down on the floor, choosing fortunately a spot near the radiator. The harassed women, governess, nurse and nursemaid said nothing to me the first time, nor the second that they found her asleep on the floor, but finally came to me explaining that Mademoiselle was very determined to die of pneumonia.

Jinny looked at me with grave shining eyes when I asked her what such naughtiness meant.

“It is not naughtiness at all, Mamma, you misunderstand, it is the saintly life, ‘_la sainte vie_.’”

Fortunately I was sufficiently aware of her romantic absorption in the lives of the saints, and of her habit of applying everything that she read or heard to herself, to guess what influence was working on her. The “saintly life” had come up before. She had already had periods of fasting that had given way before her great liking for bonbons, and periods of prayer, that had given way to sleepiness, and had even attempted at one time to beat her little shoulders with a strap off a trunk, all of which things had worried me considerably, but none of which had been immediately dangerous to her health, so I entered straight upon the subject in as sympathetic a tone, that is on as high a moral ground as I could find, using all my wits to adapt my conversation and my thought to her mind, as if, as indeed may have been the case, her idea was more lucid than my own.

“Darling,” I said in a tone as grave as the one she had used to me, but with a certain timidity that she in her exaltation of the young devotee had certainly not felt at all, “the saintly life is a beautiful thing when rightly understood; it is too beautiful to be entered upon easily and capriciously. If you have a true wish to model your life on that of the saints who gave up every comfort for the salvation of their souls, then I will help you. I will do it with you. We will change everything. We will take away all the pretty things, and empty these rooms, yours and mine, of the pictures, and the rugs, keeping only the strict necessaries. We will sleep on hard beds, floor, we will eat bread and water every day, nothing more; we will wear no more nice clothes, we will each have a serge dress and very plain underwear, of some strong cotton stuff, we will--”

But poor Jinny had grown quite pale. “Oh, Mummy, Mummy, you are cruel. Don’t you see I can’t do all that? Don’t you want me to want to be good.”

That you see ended well. She cried a little in my arms, and listened quietly as I explained that being good was quite another thing to the saintly life as she had understood it, and that this latter was not vouchsafed to children, and we arranged between us that it would be much more truly good, to take a great many baskets of toys to the little poor crippled children in the big hospitals than to jump out of bed when no one was looking, but I was not immeasurably reassured by my victory. With Jinny it was always a case of its being all right till the next time, and the next time was never slow in coming.

I take it that my own feeling for Jinny needs no explanation. I am a simple woman, and I was her mother; she was all that I had. But Philibert loving her so much was curious, don’t you think? It seemed so inconsistent of him! I don’t even now understand it. Perhaps the most obvious explanation is the real one. Perhaps it was just because she was so very attractive. Had she been ugly I believe that he would have disliked her. She was never ugly, she had never had an awkward age. At fourteen she had already that look of costliness, of something luxurious, sumptuous and precious that she has today. She was slender and fragile and smooth. At times she suggested a child Venus by Botticelli. Her mouth had the delicate drooping curve of some of his Madonnas, her hands were full and soft and dimpled with delicate tapering fingers. Sensuous idle hands, they were to her instruments of pleasure. Touching things conveyed to her some special delight; with her finger tips she enjoyed. I know for I have watched those hands for years, moving softly and deftly over lovely surfaces, and following the contours of flowers, of porcelain vases, but she never did anything practical with them. Even embroidery, she disliked. But jigsaw puzzles amused her--she and Philibert always had one somewhere spread out on a table. They spent hours together fitting in the innumerable tiny bits, their heads close together, excitedly comparing, fitting, exclaiming. Philibert liked the idea of his daughter’s distaste for doing anything useful. He encouraged her laziness and her absurd little air of languid hauteur. When she dropped a glove or handkerchief and waited for a servant to pick it up for her, he laughed.

Sometimes I tried to reason with him.

“You are spoiling her,” I said on more than one occasion, but he only shrugged his shoulders.

“Don’t you see, Philibert?” I would insist, “that it is bad for her to live in this atmosphere?”

“What atmosphere?”

“The atmosphere of this house, of Paris, of the world we live in.”

“Well, my dear, it is her house, her Paris, her world--she’s born to it, and belongs to it, so she may as well grow up in it. What would you have for her--something more like your own home over there, eh?--the place that turned you out, so admirably fitted for our European life--you want her to be as you were, is that it?”

“God forbid.”

“Well then--”

I couldn’t argue with him. I couldn’t tell him what I really felt and feared, or explain to him how I hated for Jinny, all the things that I now accepted for myself, for he was one of those things, the principle one; I had accepted him. I had even grown to understand him, and if it hadn’t been for Jinny, I felt that we might become friends. His extravagances, his cynicism, his fondness for women were things that I now took for granted. They no longer bothered me. For me, he would do now, I no longer asked anything of him, but for Jinny he wasn’t half good enough. As a father to my child, I found him impossible.

One often hears of estranged couples being brought together by their love for a child. With Philibert and myself, it was the contrary. We were both jealous of Jinny. We were afraid, each one, that she loved the other best, and our nervousness on this point acted to keep us in each other’s company while it made friendship impossible. Neither of us liked to leave the other alone with her for any length of time. I had stayed with Fan for three months and had come back to find Jinny hanging on her father’s every word, and to find what I imagined was a coldness between her and myself. This may have been my imagination, or it may have been true; I don’t know, but I suspected Philibert of working to alienate her from me, and he suspected me of the same thing. If I suggested taking Jinny to Ste. Clothilde for a fortnight, he either found a way of keeping us in Paris or accompanied us, and if Philibert wanted for some reason to go away, to London or Berlin or Biarritz, he was haunted by the idea that in his absence I might steal a march on him with Jinny, so really bothered I mean, that nine times out of ten, he would give up going unless I went with him. The result was that we were more constantly together than we had been since the first year of our marriage.

Looking back now to that winter of 1913-14 I see it as a season of delirium, of fever, of madness. Paris glows there, at the eve of war, in a lurid blaze of brilliance, its people giddy, intoxicated, dancing over the quaking surface of a civilization that was cracking under them. A period in the history of the human race was drawing to a close. The old earth was rushing towards the greatest calamity of our time, carrying with it swarming continents that in a few months were to seethe and smoke like beds of boiling lava--and the people of the earth as if aware that the days of pleasure were numbered, were possessed by a frenzy. I say the people of the earth, but I mean of course, the rich, the idle, the foolish, the so-called fortunate who make up society and of whom Philibert and I were the most idle, the most foolish, as we were perhaps the richest.

That winter marked the height of our folly and of our worldly brilliance, and for me it marked at the same time the deepest depth of futility and cowardice.

Philibert and I were like two runaway horses harnessed together, and running blindly, with the smart showy vehicle of our empty life rattling and lurching behind us, and poor little Jinny inside it.

His extravagance that winter was colossal. I did not try to restrain it. He felt the inertia of old age coming on him, and was having a last desperate fling: I felt sorry for him. His parties were fantastic. He bought the servants’ under-linen at Doucet’s; I only laughed when he told me. Money? Why not spend it! The more he spent, the less would be left for Jinny, and that, I argued, was all to the good. If only he could manage to run through the whole lot, then Jinny and I would be free. Dinner succeeded dinner, dance followed dance. We received half Europe and were entertained in a dozen capitals. London, Brussels, Rome, Madrid, we took them all in. It was very different from my picnic trips with you and Clémentine when we travelled second-class, carried paper bags of sandwiches and had literary adventures in old book shops with ancient scholars in skull-caps and spectacles. Philibert and I travelled in Rolls Royces or in private trains. We had maids and valets and couriers to smooth away every discomfort and every bit of unexpectedness. Philibert never missed his morning bath and massage, his Swede, too, travelled with us.

It was not very interesting. One glass of champagne is like another. Royal palaces are as alike as cabbages. Everywhere we met the same people and did the same things. We danced, we gambled, we gossiped, we ate and drank and changed our clothes, and I was often bored, and often gloomy. Too much brilliance has the effect of darkness.

In my dismal moods I told myself that I hated it, but probably I didn’t. No doubt it had become necessary to me to be surrounded by a crowd of flatterers. We are all fools--And I had no precise idea of myself. Even at night, when I was alone, and when I should have been stripped naked to my soul in the dark, I was still wrapped about to my own eyes, in the flattering disguises of the world’s adulation.

In Jinny’s eyes alone did I seem to see myself as I really was. I trembled as I looked into them.

I wonder if all women are afraid of their children? Perhaps not, the woman who has the love of her husband and a clear conscience and a sure hope of heaven. I had none of these things, and I was afraid. I had staked everything on Jinny, but my conscience was not clear about her. Instead of a hope of heaven, I had the hope of her happiness and yet I knew that I was not doing what was necessary to realize it. What I was doing was, when one thought it out, futile and ridiculous. I was wasting my life to save hers; because of her, I had been involved in this endless round of futility and I was behaving as if I believed that if I were wretched enough, she would be happy.

What I wanted most of all was to save her from an experience like my own. For her, there were to be no wretched sordid compromises with life, no unclean pleasures, no subterfuges, no lying, no fear. She was to remain good and brave and lovely and I was to find a true man for her who would love her as I longed to have her loved, reverently.

And in the meantime, she was growing up surrounded by slavish servants, by doting relatives, by luxury and dissipation and all that I did to protect her, was to shut her up as much as possible in the schoolroom.

I had always been in the habit of talking to her of Patience Forbes, her great aunt in America. It had seemed to me important for Jinny to understand and value my people. I wanted her to love the woman who had so loved me. To secure for that distant lonely admirable character the respect and affection of my child was, it seemed to me, my duty. And as a little girl Jinny had been interested in hearing about the Grey House in St. Mary’s Plains, the waggon slide down the cellar door, the attic full of old trunks, crammed with faded panniered dresses and poke-bonnets, and the back garden full of hollyhocks and bachelor buttons, and larkspur. She liked to hear of the great river that one glimpsed between the houses at the bottom of the street behind the garden, and of the ships that came smiling down laden with lumber from the great forests, and she would climb into my lap and say--“Now tell me more about when you were a little girl”--but as she grew older she lost interest in these stories, and was more and more unwilling to write to her great aunt and one day, when I finished reading to her a letter from Patience, she gave a sigh and said petulantly,

“What a boring life--‘_Quelle vie ennuyeuse._’”

“Jinny!” I exclaimed sharply.

“But it is, Mummy. It must be. I see her there. Ah, Mon Dieu, so dismal. ‘_Une vieille--vieille._’ An old old one--in dusty black clothes, in a horrid little room. All her stuffed birds round her in glass cases--so funny! But the atmosphere is cold. It sets the teeth on edge, and she is ugly, like a man, with big feet and hands. There--look!” She took up poor Aunt Patty’s photograph from the table. “Look--what has that old woman to do with me? Why does she write to me ‘My darling little Geneviève’--I’m not her darling, I don’t love her at all. I don’t want to think of her.”

I was very angry. “Jinny, you make me ashamed.”

“I can’t help it,” she almost screamed at me. “I can’t help it. _C’est plus fort que moi_--she’s strange--she’s ugly.” And she flung the photograph on the floor and stamped her feet--her face was white, her eyes blazing--“I don’t want to think she belongs to us. I don’t want you to love her,” and she flung herself into a chair in a paroxysm of angry tears.

I sent her to bed; it was five o’clock in the afternoon, and gave orders that she was to have bread and milk for her supper but when I went to her later in the evening, though she was quiet, she stuck to her idea.

“What did you mean by your terrible behaviour, Jinny?”

She eyed me gravely from her pillow.

“I don’t know, except that it is all dismal and strange in America, and I can’t like Great Aunt, and if I can’t--why then I can’t--_Cela ne se commande pas._”

I sat beside her, strangely depressed. Her little white bed with its rosy hangings, her curly blond head on the lace pillow, the white fur rug, the shaded lamp, the flickering fire, swam before me, blurred; I half closed my eyes, and saw another child, an ugly child with a long pigtail, in a cotton nightgown and flannel wrapper, kneeling by an old wooden bed in a bare little room, and a tall grizzled woman standing with a candle while the child said her prayers. “God bless my mother in Paris and take me to her soon, and make me keep my temper and be like my Aunt Patty--”

I had failed--I had failed.

But Jinny’s voice roused me. “Papa says it is an ugly country, America--miles and miles of empty fields, just grass and grass stretching all round.”

“Your father has never been there.”

“I know, but he knows about it. He says he would never go there, not for anything, and that I needn’t--so if I’m never to see Great Aunt--why bother?”

Why indeed? They were too much for me, those two, my husband and my child.

In my depressed moods I used to go to see Clémentine. She listened patiently, lying on a couch in purple pyjamas, smoking a cigarette through a holder a foot long, and watching me intently while I explained that I was no longer in control of my own life, that I was as impotent as a paralytic, and that I hadn’t even the feeling of being a part of anything that made up existence.

“It is all unreal--I have lost touch. I can’t grasp anything. There’s a space,--‘_infranchissable_,’ between me and it. At times I feel that the only reality is the past, the remote past. My childhood is real to me, nothing much else. I remember my home in America, now this minute sitting in your room, more vividly than the house I left half an hour ago. Pleasure is a narcotic--I drug myself with it, but I don’t really understand joy--I understand sorrow. Joy is a perfume that evaporates--suffering is a poison that remains.”

Clémentine broke in abruptly.

“_Ma chère amie_--take my advice, I know what you need--take a lover.”

I burst out laughing, but she eyed me gravely.

“You laugh, but I know what I am saying. Your life is abnormal, don't go against nature.” She rolled over on an elbow and laid a hand on my knee. “You must love--it will wash away all your sick fancies. You’ll see. Any one you’ve a liking for will do; surely you like some one? Don’t be romantic, be practical. Face facts. Take things as they are, and you will find beauty, mystery, rapture and sanity. Beyond the little prosaic door of compromise you will find the world of dreams. Believe me, materialism is the only road to happy illusion, and to remain sane, we must have illusions.”

Well, that was her point of view, and she may have been right. I never found out. I didn’t take her advice. Perhaps had I done so, I would be in Paris now content with the illusion she promised me. Who knows?

That sort of thing is the solution of most lives. A growing lassitude, a growing fear, the feeling that one has missed life, that it will soon be too late, and at last we give in and take in the place of what we wanted, what we can get.

I couldn’t. There was no one about who in the slightest degree resembled a lover--my lover. And I was sick of the subject of love. For years and years and years it had been served up to me, for breakfast, for lunch, for dinner. Every theatre, every music hall, every novel one opened, every comic paper was full of it. Travestied, caricatured, perverted or idealized, but always the same old thing--sex--sex--sex in all its ramifications--always monotonously the same; it bored me to extinction.

Philibert, fastening on this woman then that one, all my friends falling in and out of love, like ducks round a muddy pond; it put me in a rage with the world.

The War came--and with it the end of a world.

I sometimes think that God’s final day of judgment will not be so very different. The Edict will go out from Heaven. Life will stop. Humanity suddenly arrested on the edge of time will look over the precipice of Eternity--will pause--will shudder--then, why should it not act? Why not revolt as it did in 1914 against the menace of universal destruction? Was it not just like that?

Death was let loose on the earth. And men refusing to die, gave their lives so that man might live.

The obliteration of life! Something else took its place. All the usual things of life disappeared, human relationships, amusements, ambitions, business, hope, comfort. The people vanished. No familiar faces anywhere. Armies took their place. Men were changed into soldiers, all alike. Women were turned into nurses. Their personalities fell from them, they appeared again, a mass of workers, colourless, uniform, with white set faces in professional clothes.

Our world, Philibert’s and mine suddenly fell to pieces; all the men servants left, most of the women, called to their houses to send their men to the war. Philibert found himself one morning a private in an auxiliary service of the army; he too disappeared. The enemy was marching on Paris; Ludovic telephoned me to say that I had best leave for Bordeaux. I packed off Jinny to Nice with her grandmother. A woman whose work in the slums I had been interested in for some years, was taking an _équipe_ of nurses to the front. I went with her. Philibert’s secretary had orders to pack up all the valuables in the house. I forgot them. I forgot everything.

We went as you know to Alsace--were taken prisoners--sent back again.

On regaining Paris, I turned the house that I had hated into a hospital. Most of its treasures had already been packed up and sent away to a place of safety. The empty salons were turned into wards, my boudoir into an operating room. I enjoyed filling the place with rows of white iron beds and glass topped tables and basins and pails and bottles and bandages. It had been a hateful house, it made a good hospital. When it was in running order, I left again for the front.

I enjoyed the War. It set me free. I reverted to type, became a savage, enjoyed myself. In a wooden hut, on a sea of quaking mud under a cracking sky, I lived an immense life. I was a giant--I was colossal--I dwelt in chaos and was calm. With death let loose on the earth, I felt life pouring through me, beating in me; I exulted. Danger, a roaring noise, cold, fatigue, hunger, these my rations, agreed with me. I was a giantess with chilblains, and a chronic backache; I was a link in an immense machine, an atom, a speck in an innumerable host of atoms like myself, automatons, humble ugly minute things doomed to die, immortal spirits, human beings, my brothers.

I observed that my little tin trunk contained everything needful for life; soap, warm clothes, rubber boots, a brush and comb. I wanted nothing; I was content to go for days without a bath. The beef and white beans of the soldier was sufficient. I ate it ravenously.

I worked and was happy. I lifted battered men in my arms, soothed their pain, washed their bodies, scrubbed their feet; poor ugly swollen feet tramping to death in grotesque boots, socks rotting away in them. I enjoyed scrubbing them. I had, for the business, pails of hot water, scrubbing brushes, the kind one uses for floors, and slabs of yellow soap. For some months, it was my job to wash the wounded who came in from the trenches. Many of them were peasants, old bearded men who talked patois, in soft guttural voices and called me sister. Their great coats were covered with mud and blood, they crawled with vermin. I loved them. They had given their lives, they had given up their homes, their deep ploughed fields, their children, their cattle. They did not complain. Their stubborn souls looked out at me kindly from weary eyes, sunk under shaggy brows, and loving them, my brothers, I loved France, the France I had not, before, known.

We were sent from one part of the front to another. Our _équipe_ had a good reputation. Passing through Paris from time to time, I found opportunities for using money. I gave, gratefully. Supply depots were organized. Every one was in need, every one was doing something. The de Joigny family were pleased with me. They made a great fuss over me when I came to Paris. They spoke of my generosity, my devotion, my courage. I loved them too, bulking them together with my comrades, my _poilus_, the men of France.

I had lost track of Philibert during the first months of the war. Then I heard that he had been put to guard one of the Paris gates. He stayed there for three months, standing in the road, with a gun, stopping the motors of officers, looking at passes. Poor Philibert! And there was no one to take any interest now in what became of him. His world was finished, his friends could do nothing for him. The France that was at war with Germany did not know him. The men who were leading the nation had never heard of him, or if they had, remembered him with a sneer.

Ludovic had entered one of the ministries. I went to him. Philibert, I pointed out, was being wasted. He was a linguist. A month later he was given the rank of interpreter and attached to the General Staff. Occasionally he accompanied Ludovic to London, or Rome, or Boulogne. Poor Philibert! He would have gone to the trenches if he could. He was too old. I scarcely saw him, for four years.

When I had leave I spent it with Jinny. He did the same, but our leave didn’t often coincide.

Jinny came back to Paris and lived with her grandmother. There was a room kept ready for me in the flat.

Sometimes I motored down from the front, along the thundering roads where armies moved in the dark, and with the gigantic rumble of motor convoys, and the pounding of the guns in my ears, I would step into the little still bright sitting room with its glinting miniatures and silk hangings to find the two of them rolling bandages or knitting socks.

Jinny seemed to me quite safe there.

And in a way I was glad that the years of her girlhood should be passed in a seclusion and quiet that would have been impossible in peace time. There was no one left to spoil her now, no army of servants for her to order about, no pageant of pleasure to dazzle her eyes. The problem of her life seemed like everything else to be simplified out of recognition.

I did not know that Bianca had come back to Paris. I had forgotten her. Jinny was very sweet to me when I came. She would turn on my bath and help me take off my things, and wail over my dreadful hands, stained with disinfectants and swollen with chilblains.

“Oh, darling,” she would say, “how brave you are to do it,” and then she would shudder and add--“I couldn’t--the sight of blood makes me sick. How you can bear the ugliness--”

And I would assure her that she was much too young to do nursing.

Your mother was very kind to me. The war had aroused her from the lassitude of old age. She had risen to meet it. Lifting her gentle head proudly, she had seemed to look out beyond the confines of her narrow seclusion, across the years, and to see her country rise before her in its old beauty, its one-time grandeur.

“France will have her revenge now,” she had said, with a flash lighting her weary eyes.

And her mind appeared more vigorous. She read all the newspapers or asked Jinny to read them aloud to her. She took a great interest in my work, and seemed to regard me as some admirable but inexplicable puzzle.

“You are too brave, _mon enfant_, and too exalted. When the war is over and you come back to your old habits, to take up your old life--you will see--”

“Maybe I shall never come back to it, dear--never take up again the old life as you say.”

And again she smiled, thinking that I was joking, but I was not joking, my brain was clear, I believe I knew even then, that I would never run Philibert’s house again.

“You look happy, my child,” she said to me one day.

“I am, _belle-mère_.”

“Ah--but how curious!”

“But dear--it is not as if any one very near or dear were in danger. Philibert is safe, Blaise too, driving his ambulances.”

“But the horror, the pain, the suffering all round one--look--already in our family five young men killed--your Aunt Marianne bereft of her sons--your Uncle Jacques crippled--”

“I know--I know--I do feel for them, and I do feel for France. When I say that I am happy, I only mean, that for me the equation of life is so simple, that I am content as never before.”

“I see--you are happy because of the sacrifice you have made--because of all you have given up in the cause for our country. _Cela est très beau._”

“No, dear.” I felt bound to try and explain. “It is not that. It is not fine at all. I haven’t given up anything that I cared about. I have only got what I wanted. I have found my place, my right place--the place of a worker.”

She looked puzzled, then turned it off with a smile.

Jinny was growing up and the war was slipping by over her little blond head like a monstrous shadow. She seemed in that greyness, to become unreal. I did not know what was going on in her mind.

One night in March 1918 I staggered in on her. I must have been more tired than I realized. My head was burning. The little soft still room, your mother with her hair in stiff regular waves, a lace shawl round her shoulders, and Jinny, smiling over a story book; it was like a dream.

And Jinny was like a little creature in a dream. Her idle delicate hands, her plaintive voice were strange. She had on a rose coloured frock, and was eating sweets. Some one had sent her a box of chocolates.

“Look, Mummy, chocolates--we never have them any more, do we, _petite mère_?”

I had seen the world rushing to destruction; the powers of darkness triumphant. Just beyond those walls, along the road, one came to the edge of the abyss.

“Mummy, I hate the war, _c’est si bête_--when will it end?” she pouted.

Suddenly I was angry; I felt that it was wrong for my daughter to be like that, wrong and stupid.

“Jinny,” I cried--“are you asleep? Don’t you understand that the world is coming to an end?”

But she looked at me with curious defiant eyes and asked, “What do you mean?”

“I mean what I say. Come with me tomorrow. Come and see. Come and help--you’re no longer a child. Come!” But she drew away from me with a shiver.

“I couldn’t,” she said in a fine hard little voice.

And your mother broke in,

“Jane, you must be mad to suggest such a thing.”

“But I want her to know--to understand--to share--”

“That is wrong. What is there for her to understand? She is a child. Her life is not involved in the war. It lies beyond. She should be protected from this nightmare.”

“I want her with me.”

Your mother shook her head sadly. “If you want her with you, you should stay at home and look after her. You have been admirable, you have devoted yourself, but when the war is over, you will perhaps find that you have made a mistake.”

“Mistake! Would you have me stay at home while men are dying by thousands!”

She sighed gently. “Ah--well--dear--you know best, but I wonder sometimes, if you are not deluded--”

Jinny had disappeared. I found her in her bedroom, her head buried in her pillow.

“I’m a coward,” she sobbed, “a coward. I would be afraid to go.”

I took her in my arms. “My poor little lonely Jinny.” I held her a long time--a long time--comforting her, conscience-smitten, troubled, but the next day I left again for the front, following my monstrous illusion, answering the terrible call of the greatest imposture in creation. For I was wrong and your mother was right. The war was not a fine thing. It did not save the world or renew it. It left nothing fine or noble behind. It was an obscene monster. It called up from the soil of a dozen continents all the fine strong men, and devoured them, it summoned out of the heart of humanity, heroism, and it devoured that. Courage, faith, hope, self-sacrifice, all the dreams of men were poured into its jaws and disappeared. Nothing was left but broken men, and a ruined earth.

I ought to have stayed with Jinny. That was my job.

Her nineteenth birthday was a week after the armistice. She had changed from a child to a woman while I was away, helping men to die uselessly and suddenly I saw that she was wise as I had hoped never to see her. She said to me that day,

“I know Mummy about you and Papa--you needn’t pretend any more.”

It was time, the family said, that she should be married.

IX

We lived at the Ritz, Philibert and Jinny and I, and we were all at sixes and sevens. Philibert’s world was in pieces. He would sit by the window of our hotel salon that gave out on the Place de la Concorde, twirling his thumbs and looking at the floor as if he saw the big bright brittle thing that had been his world, lying about him in fragments.

My world! I had glimpsed it during those four years in the open; it had nothing to do with this profane ostentation of luxury, this coming and going of discreet servants, this ordering of meals and of clothes. The war had caught me up like a hurricane, had kept me suspended above the earth in a region of thunder and lightning, had carried me a long distance. Now that I had dropped to earth again, I could not get my bearings. The objects about me, the shining motors, the ermine coats, the jewelled clocks, the rich dandies, the smirkings and grimaces looked silly, detestable. I had never liked them so very much, now I hated them. I remembered the _poilus_ of France who had been my comrades, dogged humble grimy heroes, who plodded to death across fields of mud in clumsy coats of faded blue that were too big for them; I thought of France, their France, a nation of men who had humbled me to the dust and had left me weeping as a sister weeps who is bereft. I belonged somehow with them, with those who had died, asking me to send their pitiful treasures to their obscure homes, and with those who still lived, who would have to begin again now the struggle for their daily bread. And I felt akin to them in their toil, on the broad brown life-giving earth under the open sky. I suffocated in Paris.

And the peace they had fought for became in the hands of diplomats and politicians a tawdry thing. Their glib trivial lips talked of it as if it were an annoying and exasperating, but still a rather amusing puzzle; the peace a million men had died for had become the sport of bureaucrats.

One asked oneself--what was the use?--No use--they had given their lives in vain. But these were the men who had sent the nations to war. Had this group of well-fed clerks and shopkeepers the right to condemn a million innocent men to death? Would they, the men of France, have gone, had they known, had they understood? Ah, the pity of it,--all the young, all the strong, all the simple folk were gone. I heard talk of Alsace-Lorraine, of the Rhine Provinces, of indemnities. Very difficult it seemed to fix the boundaries of all the new nations that had come into existence. Impossible to get enough money out of Germany to pay for the war.

Reparation! Every one was talking of reparation! But how could they hope to repair the irreparable. The war had been a gigantic crime against the “people.” Who was responsible? I wanted to get out of this crowd of jabbering diplomats. I wanted to get away and think things out, but I couldn’t. Jinny kept me.

Jinny’s world, where was it? What was it to be? That was the immediate question, the pressing problem. She had told me that she knew all about Philibert and me. What did that mean? How much did she know? I could not tell. Her mind was closed to me.

She eyed us, her parents, strangely. “What,” her eyes seemed to ask, “are you going to do about me? You must do something. You may be done for, both of you; you may have ruined your lives; I’ve a right to live.”

It was true. We both felt it. Our nerves on edge, we saw and with exasperating clearness that we ought to join together, try to understand each other for her sake, and set about the solution of her future.

But we were strangers. The war had driven us in opposite directions. We looked at each other across an immense distance. And the fact that Jinny knew we were strangers to each other made us feel more strange. It was as if the pretence we had made for her sake had really almost become a reality; now that we need no longer keep it up, we felt uncomfortable without it. And we knew further that there was going to be a struggle between us about Jinny and we were both afraid to open the subject of her future. And we were both afraid, a little, of her. She stood there between us, lovely, aloof, mysterious, reading us, divining our thoughts, judging us. Obscurely we felt this through the lethargy that enveloped us.

Philibert was peevish. He kept asking me how much longer the Government would want to keep our house as a hospital. When I said I didn’t know, he snarled, scuffled his feet and said: “Well, can’t you tell them to take their wounded away? I want to get back there. I want to reorganize my existence. This, living like this makes me sick. Who knows what state the pictures are in? Some may have been stolen. The Alfred Stevens I’ve reason to believe were not properly packed. Everything will be damaged. I feel it. I feel it. The Aubusson tapestries from the blue salon--Janson you say, saw to them--a good firm, but I’m worried, and any way, it will take months to get everything back. What a world, what disorder! I detest disorder. Look out there at those American soldiers on their motor bicycles--riding like mad men--Paris isn’t fit to live in. It’s too bad--too bad--what is one to do? All these foreign troops swarming about. One can’t call one’s soul one’s own.”

“They helped to win the war.”

He flung off with a growl. He suspected me of not doing what I could to help him get back to his house. He knew that had I wanted to I could have got the wounded transferred at once, but he didn’t want to make the move himself at the “_Service de Santé_”--for fear that his action might seem unbecoming, and he was afraid to ask me point blank what my idea was. I had no idea--I was waiting for something to happen.

I didn’t have to wait long. It is all so curious, the way it worked in together. Bianca’s coming back. Why should she have come back? She was a woman of no character. I had frightened her and she had crumpled up and run away. But she hated me for humiliating her. She could never forgive me for having broken up her surface of perfection. So under the monstrous cloak of the war she had crawled back to get in my way, to trip me up, to do me in, somehow, and she had stumbled on the way to do it. She had come across Jinny.

And to a woman like Bianca, Jinny must have been like a spring in a desert, a thing of a ravishing purity and freshness. Like a woman dying of thirst, she flung herself at the child’s feet. I see it all now in retrospect. Poisoned, diseased, tired to death, addled and excited by drugs, sick of men, unutterably bored with herself, here was the one thing to appeal to Bianca, the one charm capable of distracting her from the nightmare that possessed her. It is the usual tale of such women. The cycle is completed. They all end that way. And add to her corrupt affection for the child the impetus of doing me a final and deadly hurt and you have the situation before you.

By the time I came back from the front, she was sufficiently intimate with Jinny to prevail upon the child, never to mention her name to me. I knew nothing. I was unaware that they had ever spoken to each other.

It would have been better if the family had been frank with me about their plans for marrying Jinny. It would have been better because it would have been kinder, and when you want to get round a person it is as well to try kindness. Also, it would have been more intelligent. Surely they might have understood me, by this time. How is it that they did not foresee what would happen? How is it that they did not know that if they tried to force my hand I would see red? You can persuade a savage to do almost anything, but if you frighten him, he smashes things. I was the savage. They should have known better how to deal with me.

It was foolish to plot and scheme behind my back and plan to put me in the presence of a “_fait accompli_.”

I can see, nevertheless, why they did it. They were afraid of me. They distrusted me. After twenty years among them, I remained for them the “foreigner.” It is painful to me now to realize this, but it was so; I had not succeeded in becoming one of them. True that during the war they had admired my work, but alas, even that service now assumed a strange aspect, for the war, it appeared, had left me very queer. I had come back with very strange ideas. Once when they were all talking of the Russian Revolution and the danger of Bolshevism spreading through Europe, I had said,

“Well, what of it?” They had looked at me aghast. “But Jane,” some one had cried, “it would be the end of civilization”; and I had, perhaps a little abruptly, brought out,

“Surely our civilization hasn’t so much to recommend it.”

They tried to laugh it off, but they were really very much worried. Aunt Clo again sent for me. “I hear you have turned socialist and are consorting with strange violent men in red ties--”

“That, dear Aunt, is nonsense. I still see Ludovic if you call him violent, and he has, at my request, presented to me some socialists. Clémentine and I are interested you know in the strange ferment of ideas that is the aftermath of the war. Frankly I find these people more alive than those of my own class, but the socialist deputies don’t really appeal to me,” and I added maliciously, “they don’t go far enough. Lenin, now, he is consistent, he has an idea--”

Your Aunt Clo chuckled--“No wonder the family is in a fever about you.”

I was annoyed. “You must tranquillize them. Clem and I go to the meetings of the third International, but I’m not going to do anything you know. It’s only that I find it such a bore to go on talking as if the world were or ever could be as it was before the war. Let me have any little distractions. They’ll do no one any harm. As long as Jinny exists, they can feel quite safe. I shan’t throw a bomb or take the vow of poverty. Communism doesn’t appeal to me when I think of my child. I want her to be safe.”

At the mention of Jinny your aunt’s face had grown serious, as serious as such a round expanse of placid flesh could grow.

“Well, what are your ideas for Jinny,” she snapped.

I was startled. I stammered. “My ideas--?”

“Yes--you know don’t you, that she’s got to be married?”

“Ah--but in time. In my country--girls don’t--”

“This isn’t your country. Jinny is nineteen, she’s very conspicuous. There are already several _prétendants_--”

“_Prétendants?_”

“Yes. Hasn’t Philibert consulted you?”

“No.”

“It is as I thought.”

“What do you mean, Aunt?”

She pounded on the floor with her cane. She was almost impotent now and spent her days in an armchair, from which she had to be lifted to bed by two servants. And her temper was short.

“Don’t be a fool! I am warning you. You’d better ask Philibert. Don’t tell him I told you. Oh well--do if you like, what is it to me, to have him angry?”

I was very much disturbed but didn’t go to Philibert and ask him what he was up to, because I wanted to gain time, and it didn’t occur to me as possible that he would really commit himself without consulting me. I wanted to gain time for Jinny herself. I had hopes for her of what seemed to me the happiest of all solutions.

Philibert thinks to this day that the poor little abortive romance of Jinny and Sam Chilbrook was my doing. Poor sweet babies. I had had no hand in their falling in love. It had seemed to me to be the work of God and I had kept out of it.

Sam had come to Paris from the army for the peace conference. He was attached to the President’s suite. I had known his father and his mother and his grandfather and grandmother. Every one knew the Chilbrooks. They lived in Washington and Philadelphia, and the men of the family had a taste for the diplomatic service. The grandfather you remember was the American Ambassador in London, years ago. They were very well off.

Sam was a romantic, with a humorous grin and the nicest voice in the world. He had nice young eyes, and freckles on his nose. He liked to do things in a hurry. He met Jinny at luncheon at the American Embassy and fell in love with her at first sight.

“Please ask me to tea alone,” he said to me after lunch. “I want to talk to you. I want to marry your daughter”--and he cocked an eyebrow like a puppy.

I laughed and said, “But I don’t think you can.”

“Please ask me to tea anyway and please Madame de Joigny don’t laugh at me. Love at first sight is sometimes true love, you know.”

I asked him to tea, and he put us into our car.

Jinny wrapped in grey furs, her face flushed palest pink, her eyes shining, snuggled up to me and took my hand.

“What a nice lunch party, Mummy.”

“Did you enjoy it, darling?”

“Yes. I talked to the American with red hair. He has a face like a sky terrier--he was very amusing.” Then with a little sigh, “Darling Mummy, I do love you so.”

When Sam came to tea--he had seen Jinny twice in the meantime--he wasted no time.

“I do seriously and truly want to marry your daughter, Madame de Joigny.”

“But you can’t, she’s a Roman Catholic.”

“That’s easy. I’ll become one.”

I laughed again. I was beginning to adore him. “I will take care of her,” he said, “as you would want me to take care of her. She would be safe with me. She would be worshipped. I would kneel to her, and I would make her happy. She would be happy, I vow to you, she would be happy.”

“I am afraid it is impossible.”

“Why--?”

“Her father has other ideas.”

“Let me go to him.”

“You may of course, but he will send you packing.”

He flushed painfully and I saw in his eyes a deep shy hurt look, the look of modesty and innocence--and faith.

“But if she loved me, surely he wouldn’t refuse then--”

“Perhaps not. I don’t know. He might all the same. It would depend on how much she cared.”

“I will make her care.”

“But,” I broke off, I hesitated. Why should I have been so scrupulous? What obligation had I to warn Philibert that his daughter might fall in love with this eligible American? Still I did have a scruple.

“It is not considered fitting, you know, in our French world, for a young man to pay court to a _jeune fille_ without her parents’ approval.”

“Then what am I to do?”

“I don’t know.”

We sat in silence a moment.

Suddenly he got up. He stood there before me, tall, clean, honest.

“You’re not against me, Madame de Joigny?”

“No, I’m not against you.”

“Well then, I guess I know what to do. I guess I can wait. You can trust me, you know. I won’t bother your daughter. All the same, we are all in Paris together, and I can’t help seeing her sometimes, can I?” His eyes smiled, but he was very serious. I realized how serious he was when Philibert remarked a few days later that he had met quite a nice young American lunching at the Jockey Club, quite a man of the world, a national polo player, a Monsieur Chilbrook. Did I know him? Yes, I said I knew him, and had known his family always. Philibert thought I might ask him to dinner with Colonel and Mrs. House, the following week. I did so, but Sam made me no sign. He was perfectly correct. The only thing that was noticeable was his successful effort to interest Philibert. I myself was surprised. Poor Sam--little good it did him.

Jinny seemed happy. She enjoyed being grown up and going to parties. In June we gave her a coming out ball, for in spite of all my premonitions we had again taken possession of our house. After that I took her to a number of dances. She was surrounded by young men of course. Sam was only one of a dozen; she treated them all with the same radiant aloofness. She made me no confidences. Her intimacy with her father was greater than ever. Together they had supervised the unpacking and rearrangement of the household treasures. Philibert was educating her. I observed that she had his flair for bibelots. She had already all the patter of the amateur collector. They went shopping together a good deal. More often than not, coming in from some luncheon I would find that they had gone out together for the afternoon.

On one such day, when I was sitting alone, Sam Chilbrook was announced. He was troubled. His eyes were dark, his young face tired.

“Jinny loves me, I know she does, Madame de Joigny, but she is unhappy. It is time I went to her father. You see I’m afraid,” he stammered, “afraid that she won’t have the courage--if I don’t--”

“But have you spoken to her--I thought you promised.”

“I’ve not spoken--I’ve kept my promise, but I wish you hadn’t exacted it. I know your daughter now. I know her character, and I love her. She spoke yesterday in a way that frightened me--”

“What did she say?”

“She said that she loved her father better than any one in the world.”

“That was all?”

“Yes, no--not quite.”

“What else did she say?”

“She said that if it came to a struggle between them, or between you and him about her--she was sure she would do what he wanted.”

“Well, then go to him!” He left me at five; it was that same afternoon only a few minutes after he had gone, that you, Blaise, were announced.

I understand now what it cost you to do what you did. _Tout simplement_ it cost you the affection of your family. You ranged yourself on my side, against them. That was what it amounted to. That anyway was the way they took it.

I remember your face when you told me that I had best go round to your mother’s flat at once, that Philibert and Jinny were there and some other persons whom I ought to see. I didn’t at first grasp what you meant. What other persons? The little Prince Damas de Barbagne of the family des Deux Ponts and his uncle.

“In your mother’s drawing-room?”

“Yes.”

“With Jinny?”

“Yes.”

“But I refused to present him to her only a few months ago.”

“I know.”

“What then--?” Suddenly it dawned on me.

“Philibert!” I almost shouted, “Philibert has done this without consulting me. That miserable little creature.”

You nodded.

I knew the Damas boy. Philibert and I had stayed with his uncle in their dreadful old prison of a place.

The young man had made on me a very disagreeable impression. His reputation was of the worst, and his appearance did not belie it. He was small and weak legged and had no chin. His skin was bad and his eyes yellow. He professed in those days a great admiration for the Crown Prince of Germany, and I fancy had taken the latter as his model. One of the things that amused him was, I found out, the torturing of animals. Fan had told me a tale about him that I had never forgotten.

One day he was terribly bored. Not knowing what to do with himself he brought all his dogs into the house. He had twelve, all kinds, greyhounds, setters, great danes. He told his man to keep them in one of the salons, while he went into the next one, and loaded his revolver. Disgusted with life, he had become disgusted with his dogs. He called them one by one. Then as they came through the door, shot them dead. He didn’t miss one. He got each one between the eyes.

“Pour parlers” of marriage were going on you told me, between Philibert and the august uncle of this heir to a bankrupt principality. I saw it all. The house of the Deux Ponts was royal. It was a branch of the Nettleburgs but had maintained a strict neutrality during the war. With nearly every throne in Europe crumbling into dust, Philibert still wanted a crown for his daughter’s head. In the midst of the savage passion of anger that had seized me, I could have yelled with laughter. Philibert still believed in his ridiculous baubles. He wanted to put his little girl on a throne. Well, I would stop him.

She was mine. She was mine.

I had borne her out of my body. She belonged to me. I remembered the months before she was born, I remembered the child in my womb, stirring--the obscure passionate tenderness welling up in me--the mysterious sense of union. I remembered Philibert’s disgust with my deformity, his constant absence. He had left me to myself during those months. He had left me, of course, to go to other women. I had brought Jinny into the world alone. The pain had been mine, and mine the ecstasy. What had Philibert to do with my child?

Now they proposed to dispose of her without my consent. They proposed to hand her over to a degenerate. Well, they wouldn’t, I wouldn’t stop them.

My entrance created something of a sensation in your mother’s drawing-room. They were all there. I had time to take them all in, while they stared at me. The august uncle who looked like the Emperor Francis Joseph was standing in the window with Philibert. Your mother had Jinny on one side of her, at the tea table, the Princeling on the other. Her face blanched when she saw me. There was terror in her eyes, physical terror, what did she think I was going to do?

Philibert was of course the first to recover himself. He came forward in his most perfect manner.

“_Chère amie_, I am so glad that after all you were able to come. I had explained to his Royal Highness about your terrible migraine--”

I took his cue. The pompous uncle and the pimple-faced Damas kissed my hand, first one then the other. I asked your mother for a cup of tea, and drank it slowly, conscious of Jinny’s eyes on my face. What did they mean, those great brown starry eyes? What was going on in her mind? I hadn’t any idea.

“I have interrupted you,” I said putting down my teacup. “Pray continue your talk.”

No one spoke.

“You were perhaps gathered together for a purpose that concerns my daughter? No?”

Philibert went crimson; the uncle coughed; I waited; your mother rattled the tea things; she looked at Philibert, he looked at her. “_Mon enfant_,” she quavered, at last, “His Royal Highness has honoured you with a demand for your daughter’s hand in marriage, and as you no doubt are aware, your husband,” her voice almost failed her, but she controlled it, “your husband, my son, is disposed to think that possibly these two young people would be very happy together.”

“Is it to ask their opinion that they have been brought here?” I asked quickly.

The uncle coughed again. The little shrimp at the table stammered--“Not at all, not at all. My opinion is very well known to Monsieur de Joigny. I should be honoured.”

I rose to my feet. I knew now just how far matters had gone. They had gone very far indeed! I had no choice. It was necessary to be quite definite. I faced the older man.

“There has been a mistake, your Highness, I do not approve of this marriage.”

Philibert made a jump towards me--an exclamation. I waved him off.

“I have other ideas for my daughter. You must excuse me from explaining what they are. And now I must beg you to let me take this child home. Come Geneviève.” For a moment she hesitated, her poor little face crimson, her eyes filled with tears. I took her hand and drew her with me out of the door.

That night Philibert and I had a terrible scene. I need not go into it in detail. I cannot bear to recall it. It seems incredible now that we should have behaved as we did. Things were said that will rankle for ever, things that would have made it impossible, even if it hadn’t been for the last ghastly episode of Bianca, for us to go on living side by side. I look back with shame to that hour, I must have been beside myself. What was goading me on more than anything else, was the realization that Jinny was against me. She had been shocked by my behaviour. That was how it had struck her. She had been horrified and humiliated. That was all. I saw it in her eyes. She didn’t care to know why I had done what I did. She only hated my having done it. She looked at me with fear and almost, I thought, with a shiver of repulsion.

I refused to give Jinny a penny if he married her off without my approval. He informed me that I could not, by French law, disinherit her and that he would find a way of bringing me to my senses. As for Sam Chilbrook--Philibert dealt with him the next morning, I don’t know what he said to him, but the boy never came back. I never saw him again. It must have been something pretty horrible.

X

There is little more to tell you. You know about Jinny’s subsequent marriage and how after all Philibert, if he did not secure Prince Damas, his heart’s desire, is still well enough satisfied with the young Duke, his son-in-law. Philibert wanted the Duke, so I let him have him. Jinny wanted the house in Paris so I gave it to her. The three live there together, quite harmoniously I am told. And I? I do not pretend that Jinny’s husband is a cad. He is no doubt, as nice as most young men about town. I merely regret that he does not love her nor she him. Doubtless they will get on very well once that fact is established between them.

You see Jinny’s marriage was my supreme failure. I have lost her, I can never do anything more for her. She will never turn to me in joy--or in trouble.

She hates me. It was because she came to hate me that I gave way. She believed that I killed Bianca. I didn’t, but then I might have, I have no way of knowing whether or not I would have killed her.

I am trying to explain to you why I have come back to St. Mary’s Plains. You remember Patience Forbes’ will. It read--“To my beloved niece Jane Carpenter, now called the Marquise de Joigny, I leave the Grey House and all that is in it, because some day, she may want some place to go.” Well, she was right--I came back because I had no other place to go to. I came back but I came too late. The people who lived here and who loved me are all dead and I cannot, somehow, communicate with them as I had hoped to. I do not know what Patience Forbes would say of my life, and I shall never know. Her ghost does not comfort me because I failed her too. I let her die, here alone.

They found her, you know on the floor by her bed, in her dressing gown, the candle on the table burned down to its socket; she must have been saying her prayers. Her Bible was open on the patchwork quilt; her spectacles were beside it and three of my letters, some weeks old, also, strangely enough, a facsimile (reduced) of the Declaration of Independence, with a pencil note “To send to Jane.” You know how it reads: “When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bonds which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them.... We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness--”

The last lines I have quoted were underlined. What did she mean by them? What did she want them to mean for me, lying there, dying, going out on the great journey alone from the empty Grey House--dead, alone in the house through that long night with the Bible and the Declaration of Independence beside her?

I do not know what she meant--I only know that I left her alone to die.

And I do not know whether I have come back defeated or victorious. In the conduct of life I was defeated. Whenever I tried to do right, I did wrong. To the people I loved I was a curse. I had a few friends. You remain, and Clémentine and Ludovic. But I must lose you too, now. I feel it my destiny to be alone. I did not understand how to live among men. But there are hours when sitting here in this shabby room, I am conscious of a feeling of high stark bitter triumph. At such times I think of my father’s grave over there beyond the horizon, on a wide prairie under a high sky. A stone. That stone and I are linked together. I loved Philibert once, I love Jinny. I am alone now, but I shall hold out. I shall not give in. My life has been wasted, but I shan’t end it. I shall see it through. It stretches behind me, a confused series of blunders. I try to understand. It is finished, but I go on living. There is nothing left for me to do but wait. Maybe if I wait long enough I shall understand what it is all for.

I love France, but I had to come back here, and I know that I will stay. It is right for me to be here. It is fitting and just. In some way that I cannot explain the equation of my life is satisfied by my coming, and the problem--I see it as clear, precise and cold as a problem in algebra--is solved.

Here, in St. Mary’s Plains there is nothing for me. The big bustling awkward town is full of strangers who have no time to interest themselves in a derelict woman who has drifted back to them from “foreign parts.” My return seems to those who remember me to be a confession of failure. They are not interested in failure, so they leave me alone. It is as well. I did not come back to talk but to think. I did not come back to begin something new, but to understand something old and finished. I do not need these bright brave ignorant young people. To do what I am doing it is necessary to be alone.

But to go back to my story. Jinny had a shivering fit that night, after the scene in your mother’s flat. Her maid called me. She lay on her back in bed her teeth chattering, her knees drawn up and knocking together. We put hot water bottles to her feet and her sides. It was a warm night late in June, but she kept whispering that she was cold. The doctor when he came said that it was nerves. He prescribed bromide and perfect quiet for some time, afterwards a change. He told me that she had a hypersensitive nervous organism, and should be protected always as much as possible from excitement or emotional strain.

She slept quietly towards morning. Her hair clung to her forehead in little damp curls, soft pale golden hair like a child’s. Her closed eyelids were swollen above the long brown eyelashes. She lay on her side with both hands together under her cheek, her lovely young body at rest. Beautiful Jinny.

I sat watching her. The sound of her father’s voice and of mine, saying hideous things rang in my ears.

Beyond the open window, the darkness was turning to light. All about were still shuttered houses filled with sleeping people, a million sleeping men and women. Their dreams and their weariness, and their disappointments seemed to be rising like a mist above the hot close houses.

I had promised Patience Forbes to love Jinny enough--enough for what? Enough--for this--to save her this.

I had failed, and I felt old, so very old, and at the same time my heart was full of childish longings and weakness. If only some one would come and comfort me. If only some one would take my responsibilities from me. I wanted help and relief. I thought of you. I knew that you, Blaise, would have helped me, but Philibert had shut the door in your face that evening and had snarled at me horrible things, saying he would never have you in the house again. He had accused you and me of a criminal affection for each other. I remembered his livid face and twitching lips. A feeling of sickness pervaded my body and soul. Jinny, asleep, was fragrant as a flower. I was contaminated, unclean.

Suddenly she was there,--Patience Forbes, my Aunt Patience, standing on the other side of Jinny’s bed. She had on her black mackintosh and her bonnet with the strings tied in a knot under her chin. But she was not quite as I had last seen her. The wisps of hair that straggled down under her bonnet were white. There was something terrible and grand about her. She was old, very old. Her face was brown and withered. She looked thin, emaciated, her eyes sunken. She looked starved. Her clothes were very shabby, the clothes of a poor woman. She was grand and terrible. Her sunken eyes shone with a splendour I had never seen before. She was looking down at Jinny--I saw her smile an ineffable smile of unutterable beauty, then I waited breathlessly, with such longing, with an anguish of longing. Surely in a moment she would turn to me, gather me into her arms--now--now she was turning--

“Mummy--what time is it?” Jinny was sitting up in her bed rubbing her eyes, yawning. Sunlight shone through the parted curtains. I looked at my watch.

“Seven o’clock, darling.”

“I would like some coffee. Is any one about? I’m so hungry. Oh dear--” She sank back onto her pillow. “I remember now, I remember--why did I wake up?”

The next day, I received a cable announcing my Aunt Patience’s death. Jinny was lying on her “chaise longue” eating chocolates. She said--“Poor thing, but she was very old, wasn’t she?”

“Yes, seventy-five years old.”

“Older than _grandmère_!”

“Yes, several years older--” Jinny was not interested. There was no one in Paris who had ever seen Patience Forbes.

Jinny seemed quite well again; only a little languid and silent. She spent most of the day on her chaise longue, reading, having her nails manicured, having her hair brushed, eating sweets, dozing; she was quite affectionate.

One evening she said, “I think, Mummy, that I would like to go into a convent.” She had on, I remember, a white satin négligé trimmed with white fox, and emerald green brocade slippers. I must have smiled.

“Don’t smile, Mummy. I’m not joking, I have thought it all out. ‘_Il faut se connaître._’ I am weak, I have a weak character. I liked Sam Chilbrook, but I didn’t dare say so. I disliked the Prince very much, I didn’t dare say so. If you and Papa could agree, I would be content to do what you decided for me--but you can’t agree. No, no, don’t be tragic. Don’t be so sorry. Let us be reasonable. If you never agree on a husband for me, I must either choose one for myself and run off with him and be married, or become an old maid. Neither seems a very nice idea, does it--but to be a nun--that is beautiful. You remember when I was little and tried to lead the saintly life--you thought it ridiculous. You did not understand. There is something in me that you do not take seriously because I am lazy and like pretty things and marrons glacés. But it is there all the same. If you were a true Catholic I could explain. To be a nun is beautiful--beautiful, and I would be safe there, and out of the way. For you and Papa there would be no more problem, you would not have to live together any more. And the sisters love me; they would be glad to receive me. They are so gentle, so sweet--you have no idea, and quite happy you know. Sometimes they laugh and make little jokes, like children. It is much happier in the convent than here.”

It was I that broke down then, and cried. I cried miserably, ugly tears, sobbing against Jinny’s languid knees. I, a middle-aged woman, disfigured, with a swollen face, a great, strong, tired, drab creature, in whose tough body life had gone stale, was humbled before my beautiful child.

I asked her forgiveness. Brokenly I begged her to be kind. And I apologized to her. Kneeling beside her I tried to explain my inability to believe in any creed, any dogma of the Church, I spoke of truth, I proclaimed as if before a high spiritual judge, my honest search for truth. Pitiful? Yes--but do you not believe that it is often so--mothers kneeling to their children, avowing their mistakes, their failures, begging for love?

I was desperate to destroy the thing that separated us--I was so lonely so alone--it seemed to me that this moment held my one chance, my one hope of drawing my child close to me. I looked up at her. Cool, lovely youth holding aloof, if only she would come, if only she would respond and take me in her slim fresh innocent arms. Ah, the relief it would be--the comfort!

“Jinny--Jinny--love me--I need your love, I am your mother. I am growing old. There is no one left for me to turn to--no one to advise me, no one to care for me, except you. Do you realize what I mean? My life is finished, it goes on only in you, only for you. Jinny, Jinny, don’t you understand, I need you.”

She stroked my hair lightly with delicate fingers, but looking up, I saw that her face was contracted in a nervous spasm--of distaste. A moment longer I waited staring up at her face with a longing that must have communicated itself to her, a longing so intense that I felt it going out of me in waves but she made no sign.

“I do love you, Mummy--you know I do,” she said in a dull little voice.

I stumbled to my feet and left the room.

Philibert had gone away, so when the doctor said a few days later that Jinny should go to Biarritz it was I who took her, though I knew she would rather have gone with some one else. I should have sent her with a companion. Had I left her alone then things might have been mended, but I was too jealous, and though I knew the truth in my heart I couldn’t bear to admit that my child didn’t like being with me. I kept on thinking of ways to win back her love, silly feeble ways. I was like a despairing and foolish lover who cannot bring himself to leave the object of his passion though he knows that everything he does exasperates her. I had no pride. I gave her presents. I did errands for her that the servants should have done. With a great lump of burning pain in my heart I went on smiling and busy, avoiding her eyes and fussing about her, and she was exquisitely patient and polite.

I do not know to this day whether Bianca followed us to Biarritz knowingly and with intent, or not. Clémentine told me afterwards that she had seen Bianca with Philibert at Fontainebleau at the Hôtel de France on the Sunday, the day he left Jinny and me, after our scene, but whether she learned from Philibert during the week they spent together of Jinny’s whereabouts and tracked her down, I cannot tell. Probably not. Yet it may be.... It is all so strange that one can believe anything. Philibert and Bianca together--after all those years--that in itself is extraordinary. What sort of relationship could have existed between them at the end? I don’t know. I do not attempt to understand. They were people beyond my comprehension, but some thing that they possessed in common, some bond, some feeling profound and complex, had evidently survived.

It is useless dwelling upon their problem. Revolting? Evil? I suppose so, and yet their infernal passion has somehow imposed upon me a dread respect. Philibert after Bianca’s death crumpled up as if by magic into a silly little old man. I saw it happen to him, there in that hotel where he came rushing on receipt of the news. He stood in my room shaking and disintegrating visibly before my eyes, profoundly unpleasant, pitiful. It was as if Bianca had held in her hand the vital stuff of his life, and as if with her death he was emptied of all energy and power.

All this happened you see at Biarritz where Bianca came and found us.

I am almost sure that I did not think of killing Bianca, even at the very end, when I found myself in her room, standing over her. And yet, if she hadn’t taken that overdose of morphine herself, that very night, what would have happened I don’t know.

It is very curious, her dying like that, whether by accident or intent, no one will ever know, on just that night, and in just that place, involving me in Jinny’s eyes, for ever. God knows there were plenty of other places on the earth where she might more logically have chosen to breathe her last. Why not in Venice in that great dark vaulted palace of hers with the black water lapping under her balcony? Or in her castle in Provence, where she lived with her demons, or in Paris in the red lacquer den with its golden cushions? Any one of those settings would have been more in keeping--but in the Plage Hôtel--above the sea, no, there was no poetic justice in her choosing that spot. And if it was an accident, then the freakish spirit who planned it did it with his diabolical eye on Jinny and me.

We had been a week in Biarritz. Jinny had found some young people with whom she played tennis in the afternoon. Occasionally I left her for a game of golf. One day coming back I saw her sitting on the terrace with a woman whose eccentric elegance was familiar, but whom I did not at first recognize. I saw her back, long and narrow, a fur wrap slipping from the shoulders, an attenuated arm hanging across the back of her chair. Jinny, all in white, her hair a golden halo in the light of the sun that was setting behind her, was facing her. Their faces were close together. The older woman was leaning forward. She had Jinny’s hand in both of hers. There was about this pose something intimate and intense. Jinny started up at the sight of me, and the woman turned her small dark head round and gave me a little nod. It was Bianca.

She was very much changed. I remember every detail of her appearance, her red turban, her soiled white gown, her fur coat that looked somehow rather shabby. She was carelessly dressed, she had an air both tawdry and neglected. Actually she didn’t look clean. Her face was startling. The makeup was badly done. Once it had been a smooth even white, now the eyelids were yellow and on the thin cheek-bones were spots of red. The finger nails of the beautiful hand that hung limp over the back of her chair were enamelled pink but dirty. She had obviously been going down hill at a rapid pace, and for one instant this realization in the midst of my panic at finding her with Jinny, gave me pleasure. For Bianca to turn into an untidy hag; that was something to make me wickedly exultant.

She looked at me calmly out of her monstrous eyes. “It is centuries since we met,” she said. I did not reply. I was trembling and I saw that she saw my trembling. Her discoloured eyelids lifted, and sent out their old fiery blue light. Her eyes grew more enormous. She stared into mine and her thin pointed lips curved into a smile. “Not since Deauville, after the death of poor Fan Ivanoff--four, five, six years--is it not? Before the war. I have been so little in Paris.” Her eyelids fluttered, her eyes deadened, a curious lassitude spread over her suddenly. She drooped in her chair, she was like a bruised soiled faded plant, almost to me she seemed to exhale the odour of decay. “I have travelled--I have wandered--Spain--Portugal--America--Buenos Aires--I am so restless, I go anywhere--” her voice trailed off. She gave herself a little jerk. Her eyes slid to Jinny, dwelt upon her. “Your daughter and I have been talking. ‘_Quel amour d’enfant_’--so _exaltée_, so sensitive.”

Jinny, it seemed to me, was rather pale. She stood nervously clasping her hands, her eyes moving from one of us to the other.

“The Princess brought me a message from Papa,” she said in a shrill defiant note.

“Ah yes, I saw him just the other day--where was it? I cannot remember, I have no memory, but he told me you were here.”

The long unclean hand again went out to Jinny. It caressed her arm. I shivered. “Don’t,” I muttered in spite of myself.

Bianca jerked, a nervous twitch, and gave a little laugh.

“Ah, you see, my child, your mother doesn’t like--” She broke off. Jinny’s face was crimson now. “Never mind--she is perhaps right. I will leave you now. I go to the Casino. It is all so boring. Perhaps later--”

She did not look back at us as she trailed away. I thought to see toads jumping up from the imprint of her feet.

Upstairs, I said as quietly as I could:

“How is it that you know the Princess?”

“Papa introduced me to her long ago--when I was quite a little girl.”

“You have seen her since?”

“Yes.”

“Often?”

“Several times.”

“You admire her?”

“Yes--she is strange. I like strange things.”

“I do not like her at all,” I said curtly.

Jinny sat on the edge of a table, poking into a box of chocolates.

“Why don’t you like her, Mummy?”

“Because she is a bad woman.”

“Oh no, surely you are wrong. She is Papa’s oldest friend.” She popped a sweet into her mouth.

“Who told you that?”

“She did herself--and besides, I know--I have known a long time. She was his first romance, his--what do you call it,--his calf love.”

I burst into harsh laughter. My laugh sounded to me ugly and terrible. Jinny’s face went pale; I crossed to the window.

“What else did she tell you?” I asked with my back to her.

“She has told me about life in convents, she is very devout. She has often been in convents to ‘_faire une retraite_.’ She says it is very soothing there, but that I should not be in a hurry about making a decision.”

“Ah!”

“Yes--she seems to understand me--she conveys much sympathy. She has a magnetism--it draws one.”

“I know.”

“What is the matter, Mummy? You are angry. I feel sorry for the Princess, she is so alone in the world, and she says she loves me, that she is wonderfully attracted to me, that I would do her good. She called herself laughing you know, but with a sadness--she called herself ‘_une damnée_.’”

I could contain myself no longer. “_Une damnée_--well, that’s just what she is--” I wheeled about. I felt my voice rising in spite of me. “I forbid you ever to speak to her again. Do you understand? You must never speak to her again.” My child’s face hardened. The eyes widened, the nostrils dilated. She was very pale. Something sinister seemed to rise between us. She receded from me.

“Don’t--don’t!” she whispered backing away.

“Don’t--don’t what?” I cried back. “You don’t want me to stand between you and this horrible woman who has ruined my life--ruined your father--ruined us all--and who wants now to ruin you.”

“No, no, no--don’t say such things.” She was screaming too now. “It is wicked of you to say such things. I don’t believe it. I don’t believe you. I won’t believe it. I love Papa, I love Papa better than you, better than you. You have done it. You have ruined his life. I know it, I have seen it. I have seen you look at him with hatred. How do you think it feels to see one’s parents hating each other? Ruined? Yes, you have ruined my life. You--you--you ought never to have brought me into the world. I wish I were dead--I wish I were dead--” She rushed into her room and banged the door.

I told myself looking out over that horrible sea, immense, restless and cold, that nothing irretrievable had happened, that Jinny would come back to me, that she would forgive, that things would be the same. But I had no faith, and what did that mean, if things were the same. Was that sufficient as a basis for the future? What if we went on and on having scenes--screaming at each other. I was ashamed, and shaken, and I was afraid. Bianca had come back--Bianca was there, down the corridor--close to us, close to Jinny. “Une damnée”? she called herself.

I must take Jinny away in the morning, but what good would that do in the end? Bianca would follow us sooner or later to Paris. Jinny would be sure to see her. I had a ridiculous picture of Bianca pursuing us from place to place, lying in wait for Jinny--laying infernal schemes. I remembered what I had recently heard of her strange habits, her vicious tastes, of the effect she had had on certain women. I saw her, a restless, haunted damned soul, the slave of infernal passions, a prowl in the world, hunting for victims, growing more implacable as she grew old.

I dressed for dinner. Jinny sent word she would dine in bed. On the way to the lift, I saw Bianca go into her room. She looked back at me over her shoulder, half smiling but with a curious look in her eyes. Was it fear? Was it regret? I thought for a long time of that look, I thought of it all evening sitting in my high window, listening to the interminable boom of the waves. Her presence, near, under the same roof was intolerable, like a dreadful smell, or an excruciating nagging sound. I was feeling again, even now, through my terror for Jinny, and in spite of my sickened sense of the woman’s decay, the impact of her personality. She existed there beyond my door, special, vivid, intense, and I began to feel her decrepitude as a reproach, her ruin as a responsibility. Moment by moment I felt her, exerting on me a horrible pressure. There had been in her dreary face, an appeal, a claim, a despair that laid on me a weight. In her eyes, there had been, memory. It was that that haunted me. Somehow, actually, her eyes had reflected the past and had dragged my mind back, afar back to the days when we had been friends. I remembered everything. In their deep burning blue light that was like a lamp lighted inside a corpse, I saw her youth and my youth glowing, and I remembered how we had been together, two strong young things, curiously linked, responding to each other, with a sympathy that should have been a good thing to us. She had said once, “Jane, I love you--you are the only friend I have ever had.” And I remembered the day she had talked to me of herself in that old castle in Provence, above the white road and dusty vineyard.

I felt sick and was aware of an intolerable physical pain in my side. Bianca, who had been so beautiful, and whom I had loved divinely once, was a rotten rag now, soiled, dingy, bad smelling--and I hated her. We hated each other. Our youth was gone--and all its beauty. There was nothing under the sun but ugliness and hatred and the principle of life was decay.

I walked the room. Jinny was asleep--lovely youth--fresh and sweet. What would become of her? Bianca and I were two old women, done for.

To protect Jinny from her, Jinny who hated me, that was all I could do now. I must go to Bianca. Either she would respond to me and give in to me because of the memory that had stared out of her face, or I would make her; I would force her to do what I wanted as I had done before, but this was to be the last time--this must be the end.

I looked in at Jinny. She seemed to be asleep. Out in the corridor some one had turned the light low. The long red carpet of the corridor led straight to Bianca’s room. I went out quickly closing the door after me. It took an instant to reach the door of Bianca’s sitting room. I knocked. There was no answer. I opened it and went in. To the right another door was open, a light shone through. Bianca was in bed. I could see her. Her eyes were closed. The lamp beside her bed shone on her face, a peculiar odour pervaded the room. “I will wake her and have it out with her,” I thought to myself.

I went into the bedroom. A number of bottles, a small aluminum saucepan and a hypodermic syringe were on the night table beside her. She was breathing heavily and noisily, drawing quick, regular, snoring breaths. It was obvious that she was drugged; the noise of her breathing was very ugly. Her face was sharp and pinched and evil. An extraordinary disorder prevailed in the room. I remember now being astonished by it. Untidy heaps of underwear about, not very clean, dragged lacey things on the floor, a high-heeled slipper on the centre table, a litter on the toilet table that reminded one of an actress’s dressing room, a tray with a champagne bottle and a plate of oyster shells on the end of the chaise longue. And pervading every thing that horrid odour of drugs and the sound of snoring.

I stood for a moment looking down at the woman in the bed. The sight of her filled me with loathing. How unclean she was! She was like a corpse. Already she was half dead. She was something no longer human, scarcely alive. Her sleep had the quality of a disease, her breath was poisonous.

Suddenly I felt some one beside me. It was Jinny, wrapped in her dressing gown. White as a sheet, she stood staring down at that dreadful face. “I heard you open the door,” she whispered, “I followed you. What is it? What is the matter?”

“Nothing,” I murmured. “She is drugged, that is all.” I pointed to the bottle of ether, the syringe in its little box. “Come,” I repeated nervously, “come away.” It was horrible to have Jinny in that room.

“But, Mummy, can’t we do something, oughtn’t we to do something?”

“No--come--it’s nothing--I mean she’s used to it.” I dragged Jinny away.

The next morning, the people in the hotel were informed that the Princess was dead. She had died in the night of an overdose of morphine.

It was Marie, Jinny’s maid, who burst in on her with the news, while she was having her café au lait in bed. I heard Jinny give a shriek and ran in to her--she had fainted.

Isn’t it strange the way it all happened? One would think that God had a hand in it, but if there is a God, why should He want my child to believe that I had committed a murder? It is that that I do not understand.

Jane’s narrative was ended with those words. She had talked that last night of my visit to her in St. Mary’s Plains, until nearly morning. Her forehead grew damp as she talked and her lips dry and her words carried along the sustained note of her voice like little frightened sounds.

And during all those hours that she talked, I remember hearing no other sound. I heard no voice in the street, nor the sound of trams going by nor of dogs barking. In our concentration we were as cut off from contact with the living world as if the whole city of St. Mary’s Plains had been turned to stone.

That was just a year ago today. I suppose she is still there in that meagre faded room, I can see her there, sitting in the high wooden chair that belonged once upon a time to Patience Forbes. The wind is hurrying across the immense prairies of her awful wide empty country. It rattles the windows of that frail wooden house. She is alone there.

Last night we talked of Jane in Ludovic’s rooms. Clémentine was there and Felix, we had been to Cocteau’s ballet. Jane would have enjoyed it, they said; she would have understood the joke, and perceived the beauty.

Clémentine moved restlessly about. “What is she doing now, I wonder? Surely she is doing something--”

“She is thinking things out.”

“Good God!” groaned Felix. “Our Jane--our great haughty creature--she wasn’t meant to think. She was meant to be looked at--she ought never to have had an idea in her head. What a waste--what a wicked waste.”

Clémentine on a footstool by the fire nursed her knees. “She did really think we were immoral. We took life as a joke. She couldn’t understand. She believed in the Bible--all the part about being wicked. She didn’t know it, but her creed was the ten commandments. She is a victim of the ten commandments.”

Ludovic shook his head. “She was right,” he said, “all her life she wanted to do right--now she has done it. She has gone back to her people. She should never have come here. There was nothing for her here, but ourselves.”

“And were we nothing?” cried Clémentine, “didn’t we love her well? Didn’t we understand?”

“No, we didn’t understand. And we didn’t count. We didn’t count for her.”

Ah, Jane, Jane, it was true. We didn’t count. In all your story, you scarcely alluded to us. We were just your friends who loved you, and we didn’t count. If only you could know what we know about yourself; if only you knew how we cared for you beyond all the differences of conduct; if only you could have realized that life is not a thing to fear, that it is a little trivial thing, or again, just a thing like food, an element like air, to be eaten, or breathed or enjoyed. But you thought it a mysterious gift, a terrible responsibility, a high and serious obligation, with a claim on your soul. You thought it a thing you could sin against. You confounded life with God.

This little street is so quiet tonight, so quiet and small. It shuts me in. It shuts me comfortably in, but beyond it there is a great distance--a great land--a great sea--a high and terrible sky.

THE END