The Little French Girl

by Anne Douglas Sedgwick

“My dear Ruth,” said Giles, “I’m sure you mean well; but you are sometimes an arrant ass.”

“It’s all very well,” said Ruth to her sister when Giles had gone to shut himself in his study; “ass or no ass, I’ve thought for some time now that Toppie was quite liable to go off her chump. It’s sexual repression coming out in religious mania; plain as day.”

“Sexual repression!” Rosemary stared. “What an extraordinary thing to say, Ruth! Toppie’s no more repressed than you or I.”

“Yes, she is. Sensible people like you and me work it off, sublimate it, in games and work and all sorts of healthy activities, whereas poor foolish Toppie has always moped and brooded at home, never knowing what she was or what she wanted. You’re old enough to read Freud now, Rosemary, and the sooner you do the better. He will explain it all to you.” Ruth’s universe was of the latest tabloid variety.

Giles, meanwhile, in his study, sat and wondered what he should do next. Until he had seen Alix again he did not know. How could he go to Toppie? What was there to say to Toppie? He had answered all her questions on the Autumn afternoon in the birch-woods. He had answered all her questions about Owen, and he had answered all her questions about himself. She had seen him on that afternoon place himself on the side of madame Vervier. “She is the product of her mother,” he had said of Alix. “Do you find fault with it?” He had showed himself as understanding madame Vervier; as exculpating her. Toppie might come to forgive Owen, caught in the horrible siren’s net; she would never, he believed, forgive him. Unless she sent for him, how could he go to her?

In the midst of these reflections he heard a motor drive up to the door and, going to look out, saw with astonishment Lady Mary Hamble descending from it. Lady Mary could only have come to see Alix and, after she had disappeared, he stood wondering what Alix would find to say to her. He had, while he had brooded on their disaster, almost forgotten Alix’s love-story and it seemed now to have lost all its potency. Jerry was too light, too boyish to face the resolutions that would now be needed. “She’s too good for him,” Giles muttered to himself, as he had muttered of the French order on the summer day at Les Vaudettes, standing with bent head and hands in his pockets as if listening for what next was to happen. Too good for him. Yet perhaps Jerry would not fail.

What was next to happen did not long delay, and the sight of his mother’s face in the doorway warned him that it was something quite unforeseen.

“Oh, Giles, dear!—Will you come?” Rarely had he heard his mother’s voice so shaken, and if her face had shown consternation last night it was almost horror that it showed this morning. “Lady Mary is here,” she said. “She came to see me. Oh, Giles—it is about poor little Alix. Lady Mary has heard—terrible things about her mother.”

So it had fallen. Better so, perhaps, thought Giles, as for a moment he stared at his mother in a receptive silence before following her to the drawing-room.

Lady Mary was there, floating, to Giles’s sense, in an indefiniteness, made up of lovely hesitancy, veils, and a touch of tears, that was yet more definite than a steely armour. She came towards him at once with outstretched hands, saying: “Dear Giles, perhaps you can help us.”