'Certainly I could. Money lasts, and love so often doesn't.' Helen continued to smile as she spoke.
There was now a tremor of pain in Althea's protest. 'Dear Miss Buchanan, I can't bear to hear you speak like that. I can't bear to think of any one so lovely doing anything so sordid, so miserable, as making a mariage de convenance.' Tears rose to her eyes.
Miss Buchanan was again silent for a moment, and it was now her turn to look slightly confused. 'It's very nice of you to mind,' she said; and she added, as if to help Althea not to mind, 'But, you see, I am sordid; I am miserable.'
'Sordid? Miserable? Do you mean unhappy?' Poor Althea gazed, full of her most genuine distress.
'Oh no; I mean in your sense. I'm a poor creature, quite ordinary and grubby; that's all,' said Miss Buchanan.
They said nothing more of it then, beyond Althea's murmur of now inarticulate protest; but the episode probably remained in Miss Buchanan's memory as something rather puzzling as well as rather pitiful, this demonstration of a feeling so entirely unexpected that she had not known what to do with it.
If, in these graver matters, she distressed Althea, in lesser ones she was continually, if not distressing her, at all events calling upon her, in complete unconsciousness, for readjustments of focus that were sometimes, in their lesser way, painful too. When she asserted that she was not musical, Althea almost suspected her of saying it in order to evade her own descriptions of experiences at Bayreuth. Pleasantly as she might listen, it was sometimes, Althea had discovered, with a restive air masked by a pervasive vagueness; this vagueness usually drifted over her when Althea described experiences of an intellectual or æsthetic nature. It could be no question of evasion, however, when, in answer to a question of Althea's, she said that she hated Paris. Since girlhood Althea had accepted Paris as the final stage in a civilised being's education: the Théâtre Français, the lectures at the Sorbonne, the Louvre and the Cluny, and, for a later age, Anatole France—it seemed almost barbarous to say that one hated the splendid city that clothed, as did no other place in the world, one's body and one's mind. 'How can you hate it?' she inquired. 'It means so much that is intellectual, so much that is beautiful.'
'I suppose so,' said Miss Buchanan. 'I do like to look at it sometimes; the spaces and colour are so nice.'
'The spaces, and what's in them, surely. What is it that you don't like? The French haven't our standards of morality, of course, but don't you think it's rather narrow to judge them by our standards?'
Althea was pleased to set forth thus clearly her own liberality of standard. She sometimes suspected Miss Buchanan of thinking her naïve. But Miss Buchanan now looked a little puzzled, as if it were not this at all that she had meant, and said presently that perhaps it was the women's faces—the well-dressed women. 'I don't mind the poor ones so much; they often look too sharp, but they often look kind and frightfully tired. It is the well-dressed ones I can't put up with. And the men are even more horrid. I always want to spend a week in walking over the moors when I've been here. It leaves a hot taste in my mouth, like some horrid liqueur.'