The Little French Girl

by Anne Douglas Sedgwick

Lady Mary, taking Alix by the hand, as though she might feel, as a foreigner, strange in a strange country, led her upstairs to a bright sweet room where rose-clotted chintzes were drawn back from the bed and windows and flowers stood on the writing- and dressing-tables and enticing bottles with little labels round their necks on the wash-hand stand.

“Debenham will get you everything. Ask her for anything you want,” said Lady Mary, introducing the elderly maid who entered with hot water. “You can find your way down? We’re having tea in the drawing-room, just out of the hall. And then you must have a little rest. Some young people are coming over after dinner to dance. Are you fond of dancing?”

“Fonder than of anything, I think,” said Alix; and Lady Mary, smiling, said “Good.”

When she was left alone and had taken off her hat and washed, and combed her hair, Alix stood before the glass and looked at herself attentively. She looked well after the long drive. It had not been really cold, though her lips were a little pale. She bit them to make the colour come, and wondered, bending closer, whether she should powder her face. She had never yet used the box of powder, teinte Rachel, in her dressing-case, though Maman had told her that she might do so if she thought it advisable. The radiant lady used liquid powder; Alix had seen that at once, and her lips were reddened artificially. Alix decided that she would leave herself alone. “It goes better with my hair; one colour all over like that; and the right colour,” she reflected, while the spicy elation ran still more warmly through her veins. Maman had chosen with her, at a specially favourite little shop in the rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, the jumper of palest blue and grey, patterned like a fritillary; and the string of dull brown beads and the blue skirt and the grey shoes and stockings all went perfectly with it. “I am bien; très bien,” she thought; and as she went down the passage and crossed the landing and looked down into the firelit hall with its flowers and screens and great blazing logs, she felt herself so strangely Maman’s child. It was as if she knew, for the first time in her life, an elation that Maman had often felt.

They were all in the drawing-room where tea was being laid, Jerry and Lady Mary and Mr. Hamble, and two young girls and a young man and an old-young man, who had evidently been dancing and who wished to seem much younger than he was.—“I will avoid dancing with him,” thought Alix. “He is too stout and he brushes his hair up over his head from behind so that it shall not be seen how bald he is.”—And the radiant lady was talking to Giles. Giles stood with her before the fire and looked dreadfully cross, and that was because he did not like her. But other people liked her; a great deal. Her soft locks, now smooth, now clustering, were of the purest gold and her eyes of a marvellous blue, and she, too, was undoubtedly bien, très bien, in her white silk jumper and her white woollen skirt and string of pearls. But Giles did not like her. And she did not like Giles, either, though she was pretending to carry on the kindest of conversations with a dull young man, and when Jerry came up to Alix herself the golden-haired lady, smiling more sweetly than ever upon Giles, saw everything that passed between them and was not pleased. She did not care a rap about Giles. What she cared about was Jerry.

It was characteristic of Alix that the more she saw and felt, the more silent and aloof did she become. It might have been a fundamental racial caution in her blood; the instinct for being sure, first, where you were, and, second, sure of where you wished to be seen as being before you made a movement; and as she felt the pressure of all these strange new realizations—strangest of all about herself—she knew that she possessed reserves of courteous convention more than adequate for any contingencies that might arise at Cresswell Abbey. Quietly smiling at Jerry, she took the place Lady Mary indicated to her beside her on the sofa and saw that the golden-haired lady still watched her while pretending not to.

The two young girls were guests. They had very sweet voices that did not mean much. One of them was pretty, and the stout gentleman with the hair brushed over his baldness jested with her in a low voice, but, though he tried so to please her, the pretty girl, while she ate a great many cakes, looked at him with eyes that did not find him amusing. Alix felt with her.

“From Jack,” said the radiant lady, looking up from a letter; the butler had just brought in the letters.

“What news of Jack?” asked Mr. Hamble. The golden-haired lady was married to his nephew and her name was Marigold. Jack, it seemed, was rather enjoying his job at Singapore. He wrote a long letter, and Mrs. Hamble’s marvellous eyes became very wistful while she read, but Alix felt sure that if she had been reading alone in her own room they would not have looked like that; hard and indifferent rather.

“My dear, don’t be so silly,” said the other girl to the young man who was short and robust with a tanned jolly face. He was a sailor, and Alix liked his face and felt that with him she would like to dance. They all knew each other very well and laughed and talked and she felt they saw her as a very young school-girl, for Jerry was now talking to Giles about Oxford, and no one paid any attention to her until Lady Mary began to ask her about Normandy and then about Beauvais and Rouen and so on to Chartres, on which the bald man, whose name was Mr. Fulham and who wrote books, as if observing her for the first time, asked her if she knew his friends the marquis and marquise de Tréville in Normandy and, when she said she did not, turned to the pretty girl again.