Tea was made and they were all talking of the things they did and the people they did them with. Alix heard of a Women’s Institute, of Boy Scouts and Girl Guides, and a village Choral Society that Mrs. Bradley conducted. Giles sang in it, and the girls and Jack and Francis when they were at home. “And you must sing with us, Alix,” said Mrs. Bradley, and they asked her about her piano lessons and the singing at the Lycée, and she had to confess that she had never heard “The Messiah,” at which there was a shout of good-natured protest from Ruth and Rosemary. “But you’re not a musical nation, are you?” said Ruth; and disposed of France as a musical nation.
The talk made Alix think of the thick slices of bread-and-butter that Ruth and Rosemary and Giles were eating, it was so kindly and useful. Very different from the talk to which she was accustomed in Maman’s salon; and Maman’s salon itself was as different from this as the talk. It was small, yet it was stately. She and Maman had done their best for the “petit trou” of an appartement in the rue de Penthièvre, and Maman’s russet head, as she sat with her cigarette at the tea-table, had melted and shone against the old tapestry, grey and green and citron, and her lovely face had seemed to belong to the Empire sconces and the carnations in their tall crystal vases that made light constellations on the mantelpiece. Maman’s salon, though stately, was dense and rich and sweet, and the talk that passed, soft and shining, was like a beautiful, iridescent soap-bubble tossed so lightly from one to the other; from monsieur de Villanelle, with his pointed red beard and sad blue eyes and long Flemish nose like a Memling saint; to mademoiselle Blanche Fontaine; and from her to monsieur de Maubert, with his Jovian head; and from him to monsieur Jules, dark and gloomy, who sometimes let it drop in his abstraction, unless Maman gave it a little puff that carried it on to madame Gérardin, who received it with shrill little outcries, prettily playing with it—Alix had to own that she played prettily with talk—until it was safely back in Maman’s hands again. And then another was blown. How Maman smiled; how she lifted gay yet sombre brows; how lovely they all thought her. And though one might see talk so light only as a soap-bubble, Alix dimly apprehended that it was fertile, creative; that it spread, like a sweet fragrance; that it floated like a winged seed on the breeze, out from Maman’s salon to permeate, alter the world. It made a difference to the world what monsieur Villanelle thought about the last book and poem; what monsieur Jules thought about the last painter, mademoiselle Blanche about the last play, and monsieur de Maubert about the latest feat of Léon Daudet or Charles Maurras. And since, to all of them, it was in Maman’s reception of their ideas that the final verdict lay, Maman, to the world at large, made the greatest difference of all.
“You’ll see what a jolly life you’ll have here, my dear kid,” Rosemary remarked to her; Rosemary, undismayed by her rebuff, had worked through the bread-and-butter and was now eating quantities of cake. She was only six months older than Alix, but she assumed protecting airs towards her. “Girls in France have a beastly mewed-up time, haven’t they?”
“Have you been much in France?” Alix asked her. She felt no call to combat Rosemary’s conceptions. She was, indeed, completely indifferent to what they might be. She asked her question from mere politeness.
“Not much; but Ruth and I stayed with a French family once. My word! they were quaint! They thought the Bible improper reading for jeunes filles and picked their teeth at the table and I don’t believe they ever took a bath. They almost had apoplexy when we said we had to have one every day; thought it would be sure to give us des rhumatismes.”
“Many of us are quite clean,” Alix remarked, and at this Giles laughed loudly.
“There’s one for you, you young savage,” he commented, whereupon Rosemary bounded at him and grappled with his hair.
“Help, Ruth! He’s choking me!” she screamed, and Alix, with some astonishment, watched the uncouth game that followed, Giles throwing off his sisters alternately until they tumbled on the floor and sat, dishevelled and delighted, getting their breath and smoothing back their loosened hair.
“Not quite so much noise, dears,” Mrs. Bradley remarked once or twice, but she continued calmly to converse with Toppie who glanced at the mêlée, Alix thought, with a remote, repudiating eye, while she said: “I find him a thoroughly bad boy. There’s something fundamentally wrong with him.”
“Oh, poor little fellow!” Mrs. Bradley sighed. “His home and heredity are great handicaps, aren’t they?”