“I love a secret,” she had said once to Paul, when he urged that her life was dull. “It sets us a little further apart from others and a little nearer together. It will be fun keeping it up, and we shall laugh of an evening, locked safely away in the midst of Fez in our little hidden palace.” It was fun, too, for Marguerite to dress herself in a fine silk caftan of pink or pale blue reaching to her feet, to pass over the mansouriya, to slip her bare feet into little purple embroidered heelless slippers, to wind a bright scarf about her hair, to burden her ankles and arms with heavy clashing rings of silver, to blacken her long eyelashes and veil the lower part of her face and go shopping with one of the negresses in the Souk-Ben-Safi. It was fun also to return home and transform herself into a fashionable girl of the day and wait in this southern patio for the coming of her lover.
“I love routine like a dog,” she said on this evening. She was sitting on the low cushion by Paul’s side. Her slim legs showing pink through the fine white silk of her stockings were stretched out in front of her. She contemplated the tips of her small white satin slippers. “I don’t want any more surprises,” and Paul’s face grew for a moment grave and twitched with a stab of pain. “I don’t want any more people. I have had enough of both. I love going up on the roof and watching that great upper city of women, and wondering what’s going on in the narrow streets at the bottom of the deep chasms between the houses. I have books, too, and work when I’m not too lazy to do it, and I am learning the little two-stringed guitar, and I want one person, one foolish dear person, and since I’ve got him, I’m very happy.”
Paul reached forward and, closing a hand round one of her ankles, shook it tenderly.
“Listen to me, Marguerite!” he began, but she was upon her feet in an instant. She snatched up Paul’s kêpi and cocked it jauntily on her curls.
“Canada?” she cried in a sharp, manly voice, and saluted, bringing her high heels together with a click and standing very stiff and upright. She hummed the tune of “The Maple Leaf,” interpolating noises meant to parody the instruments of an orchestra, and she marched in front of Paul and round the patio quickly and briskly like a girl in a pantomime procession, until she came back to her starting point.
“Australia!”
Again she saluted and marched round to the tune of “Australia will be there.”
“The U-nited States of America!” she announced, and this time she skimmed round the patio in a sort of two-step dance, swift as a bird, her white and silver frock glinting and rippling as she moved.
“Yankee Doodle went to town
Upon a little pony,”