Part 67 (1/2)
”I must go! I must hear, see!”
The composer cried out.
”Come with me, my Susan, and you, Max, old person!”
There was a patter of running feet, a sound of full-throated laughter from Elliot, and presently silence but for the now very distant music.
”He is a baby,” observed Madame Sennier.
She yawned, slightly blowing out her veil.
”How hot it is!”
Pierre came out carrying a tray on which were some of the famous fruit syrups, iced lemonade, cakes, and bonbons.
”These are the things your husband loves,” said Charmian, pointing to the syrups. ”I wonder--” She paused. ”Did you make as great friends with my husband as I have made with yours?” she asked lightly.
Madame Sennier spread out her hands, which were encased in thick white kid gloves sewn with black. Her amazingly thin figure, which made ignorant people wonder whether she possessed the physical mechanism declared by anatomists to be necessary to human life, somehow proclaimed a negative.
”My husband opens his door, the window too. Yours keeps his door shut and the blinds over the window. Jacques gives all, like a child. Your husband seems to give sometimes; but he really gives nothing.”
”Of course, the English temperament is very different from the French,”
said Charmian, in a constrained voice.
”Very!” said Mrs. s.h.i.+ffney.
Was she smiling behind the veil?
”You ought to go to America,” said Madame Sennier. ”n.o.body knows what real life is who has not seen New York in the season. Paris, London, they are sleepy villages in comparison with New York.”
”I should like to see it,” replied Charmian. ”But we have nothing to take us there, no reason to go.”
She laughed and added:
”And Claude and I are not millionaires.”
Madame Sennier talked for two or three minutes of the great expense of living in a smart New York hotel, and then said:
”But some day you will surely go.”
”There doesn't seem any prospect of it,” said Charmian.
”D'you remember meeting a funny little man called Crayford in my house one night, an impresario?” said Mrs. s.h.i.+ffney, moving her shoulders, and pulling at one of her long gloves, as if she were bored and must find some occupation.
”Yes, I believe I do--a man with a tiny beard.”
”Like a little inquiring goat's! D'you know that he's searching the world to find some composer to run against Jacques? Isn't it so, Henriette?”
”So they say in New York,” said Madame Sennier. ”I wish he could find one; then perhaps he would leave off bothering us with absurd proposals.
And I'm sure there is plenty of room for some more s.h.i.+ning lights. I told Crayford if he worried Jacques any more I would unearth someone for him. He doesn't know where to look.”