Jane--Our Stranger: A Novel

by Mary Borden

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.

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