Part 41 (2/2)

Marise waited a long time before she spoke, so that she would not flame out as she felt. That would not be speaking in her father's vernacular, and if there was one thing which every instinct of Marise's taught her, it was to speak to every one in his own language. Nothing in the world would have induced her to expose her own to other people's casual comments, her own, in which she spoke to herself, bitterly, caustically, skeptically, tragically, as no one had ever heard her speak aloud. When she could command herself to select the right phrase out of her father's vocabulary, she remarked, pus.h.i.+ng her tiny coffee-cup away with a gesture of finality, ”I don't believe I'm very much of a marrying sort.”

Her father's comment on this was to say stolidly, ”Oh, every girl thinks that.” But if he thought he could get a rise out of Marise with this provocation, he was mistaken. She now turned away from the little table and began with an indifferent air to arrange the coal-fire in the grate.

They were sitting in the salon.

”Don't you like men?” he asked presently.

She laughed a little, ”To dance with.”

He looked at her more keenly than he had and asked, ”Don't you trust men?”

She turned this off by riposting lightly, ”How much is it safe to trust anybody?”

It was as though a chance stroke had cut through the d.y.k.e and let out in a rush, waters that had lain sleeping.

”Never trust anybody but yourself,” he told her urgently, the words heavy with the intensity of his conviction.

A moment later he added, more deliberately, his manner tinged with his habitual saturnine humor, ”And it's not safe to trust yourself very far.”

It wasn't at all what he had meant to say to her. But it was such an undertaking to say anything. And what was there to say anyhow? He decided to let it go at that, drank the last of his liqueur, fell back in his armchair and reached for the chess-board.

”I hope you got a good supply of that Chartreuse,” he said, beginning to set up the men. ”It's very much better than what we've been having. Not so syrupy. I do loathe syrupy things.”

After the game was over, he took up his Paris Herald and Marise, freed from the necessity to make talk, went to the piano. She began to play, not Chopin as she would have liked, but a dance from the Arlesienne Suite. Father detested melancholy music.

After she had finished, she sat still, sunk together on the piano stool, staring at the music but not seeing it. She heard her father rustle his newspaper as if he had lowered it to look at her. But for once she made no attempt to arouse herself. She continued to present to him a silent, dejected back.

He must have considered this for some minutes when he finally remarked, ”I suppose there are people who _like_ birthdays!” Then with a yawn, ”But for me, they always make me think of all the ones I have still to get through with, year after year, one by one.”

Marise's shoulders bowed under the weight of his words and his accent.

She still said nothing.

He took up the newspaper again, but before he began to read he exhorted her, ”Oh, well, stick it out! Stick it out, Molly, as best you can. It doesn't last so very long.”

CHAPTER x.x.xIX

Paris, May, 1907.

”Wouldn't you _think_,” asked Eugenia, looking about her, ”that anybody who could get up such a room as this, such a perfect room, would know how to get herself up better?”

”You don't suppose for a minute that she doesn't know how to!” Marise rejoined. She added after a moment, to tease Eugenia, ”Perhaps she thinks it ordinary to be chic. Perhaps she thinks it is more distinguished to have her very own genre.”

Eugenia said with a nettled accent, ”Well, wouldn't you think if she were going in for a genre of her own, she'd pick out one that was a little more ornamental than her flat-chested, old-maid, provincial school-teacher variety?”

Marise laughed. It always gave her a little malicious amus.e.m.e.nt to make Eugenia uneasy. To make her still more so, she added, ”Yet you know well enough, Eugenia, in any room full of people, let Mme. Vallery come in with that mild, oh-I'm-n.o.body, don't-mind-me sort of air of hers, and everybody else looks like a dressmaker's mannequin.”

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