Part 42 (1/2)
Eugenia, alarmed for her standards, annoyed and aroused, disputed the point with warmth, ”That's only because you know who she is. If you didn't, you'd take her for the concierge's country cousin.”
Marise shook her head exasperatingly, ”No you wouldn't. She has _cachet_. You can see it a mile away.”
Eugenia suddenly conceded the point with grudging wonder, ”How does she _do_ it?” she marveled, unreconciled.
”Personality,” diagnosed Marise, and then seeing that Eugenia's face looked really clouded, she stopped her teasing abruptly, ashamed of the unkind impulse which drove her to it, and of the malicious pleasure she took in it. What was the inner irritation with everything that kept her so aware of other people's weak points and so easily led into playing ill-naturedly on them. Now, here and now, let her resolve she would never tease Eugenia again.
But she knew she would.
She did, however, resist an easy opening, given her by the next remark of Eugenia's, as she looked across the beautiful room, ”What _makes_ it all so just right? I'm going to start in at that corner, and look at every single thing, and find out _what_ makes it right.”
Marise restrained the mocking words on the tip of her tongue, and turned away to the half-open window, near which she stood. Across the empty street in the pale gold of the spring suns.h.i.+ne, the vaporous young green of the Luxembourg showed like a mist through the tall iron palings. The light blue sky above was veiled with hazy white clouds, stirred by a young little spring breeze, which blew languorously on the girl's cheek.
It came over her, all of it, with a soft rush, the invitation to life, the lovely, treacherous, ever-renewed invitation to live. And she drew back from it, with her ever-renewed determination not to be taken in by it. It was always too horribly lovely in May. It made her ache, it made her want to cry, it made her horribly unhappy. How detestable to have it so lovely, looking so seductive as though this were only the promise of something lovelier ... when there wasn't anything to redeem the promise, when it was all just a part of the general scheme to fool you.
Behind her Eugenia's voice said enviously, ”Where did she get all these terribly quaint Louis XVI things?”
How thoroughly Eugenia's English diction teacher had rooted out that ”turribly” of Eugenia's, thought Marise.
Aloud she answered, ”She began collecting years ago, before anybody else thought of it.”
”I shouldn't think a teacher would have much money to collect.”
”Oh, she picked them up for nothing, in corners of whatever province she happened to be in, out of barns and chicken-houses and attics.”
Eugenia said complainingly, ”It seems to me she always has been able to pick up something for nothing. Look at her husband.”
Marise said over her shoulder, ”Oh, she didn't get much, when she got him. He never would have been anything except his good looks, if she hadn't taken him up. And she didn't get him for nothing--not much! Mlle.
Hasparren says--every one who knows them says--that she made him. She writes his speeches now. I've seen her. And never bothers him by being jealous.”
”I should hope _not_,” commented Eugenia. ”She's ages older than he. And he's such a ripping good-looker.”
Marise found Eugenia's fervent accent rather distasteful. Not that she minded her latest fad of finding married men so much more interesting subjects than the others. Eugenia's affairs never lasted more than a minute anyhow. But she wished Eugenia would pick out somebody with more brains than Mme. Vallery's husband, somebody not so well satisfied with himself.
”He's an awful imbecile,” she said.
”What did Mme. Vallery marry him for, if she's so terribly intelligent?”
challenged Eugenia. She delighted in using the words she had formerly mis-p.r.o.nounced, and giving them the purest, most colorless intonation.
There was not a trace now, in her speech, of the sweet, thick, unstrained honey of her original southern accent.
”She has brains for two,” said Marise shortly, displeased by the direction of the talk. As a matter of fact, Mme. Vallery had once informed her why she had married her handsome, unintelligent husband.
She had said warningly one day, when Marise had drawn back from a match Mme. Vallery had proposed for her, ”Don't carry that too far, dear child. You will have to give in to the flesh sooner or later. You might as well do it young, before the growth of your intelligence spoils your enjoyment of it, as wait till you're driven to it, as I was. It's not amusing in the least, to have to take it all mixed with the contempt of your brains. You'll find you have to take your share, one way or another.”
Marise looked out frowningly at a great beech tree bursting into life in the garden across the street. It held its huge, flowering crest proudly into the spring air. To look at it was like hearing a flourish of trumpets, triumphal, exulting.
That was all very well for trees, thought Marise, that stupid, yearly emergence into a life that promised so much and brought futility.
Along the gravel-walk, inside the Luxembourg, under the hedge of lilacs, under the new splendor of the great beech, a young man and a girl in a pale gray dress were strolling. They looked at each other, and smiled.
”That's the way my father and mother probably walked together,” thought Marise, wincing. ”That” was one of the clumsiest, most obvious parts of the general conspiracy to fool you. But when you had the key to the code, as Marise had, there was little danger that you would be taken in.