The Little French Girl

by Anne Douglas Sedgwick

“Will it? I can’t help being afraid that she’ll be disappointed. She’d have preferred the better match for you, darling little Alix.”

“She will not think it better. It was all she had left to hope for, that was all. It has wounded her pride horribly to have to hope for it—after the bitter things it has meant for her and for me.”

“But—if you could have cared.—Everything would have come right. Lady Mary is so fond of you and she would have stood by. Darling, it isn’t only loving;—no one knows that better than you do;—it’s living. Do you face it all? To live in Oxford? To be the wife of a humdrum scholar? To have no balls and no riding? To wear”—Giles found—“the wrong sort of clothes and think about ordering breakfast. Darling, Jerry loves you, you know, and the bitter things would all fade away. Such a different life is there for you to take. I can’t help seeing, though we love each other, that it’s the life you were meant for and that the life with me in Oxford isn’t.”

“Oh, no, Giles, you do not see that,” said Alix. She put her hand on his shoulder, as if with its pressure to help him to think clearly. “You are English and believe that more than anything it is right to marry the person you love.”

“But you are French, Alix. It’s the other belief that’s in your blood. The belief in what’s suitable.”

“Ah, but it is true what Maman says to me, when she reproaches me; I have in some things become English. I think the thing most suitable of all is to love one’s husband. To marry Jerry, loving you;—no, Giles; you know that that would not be possible to me. And I do not love him at all. He is not near me at all; while you are like a part of my life.—No, listen to me, dear Giles.—This is not making love. It is being French; it is being reasonable. Even the clothes and the breakfasts;—oh, I know that they are important.—But I am used to being poor and to knowing how to be right with very little money.—In clothes and in breakfasts, Giles, I shall know how to be right.”

Her eyes, resting on him, were the eyes of the English Alix, of the woman who chooses, for herself, her life and the man she will share it with; yet their look was a French look, too. The look of one who has no illusions; who sees an order and accepts it; an order to live for and to make one’s own. “And there will be the ideas and the atoms to watch, and the Bach choir to sing in,” she finished; “and walks in the country;—and then I shall be in France, for all the holidays, with Maman, Giles.”

She rose as she spoke, for the storm had passed. Sunlight was flooding in through the high pale windows of the clerestory. The Virgin’s crown glittered against her pillar. Slowly, hand in hand, Alix and Giles walked down the nave.

But there was something more he had to say to her, here, in her France, in her church, beneath her Virgin’s blessing hands. This woman Alix had made none of the conditions that the child Alix, bewildered, charmed, afraid, had asked of her first lover. She asked no promises. She left everything to him. It was his order she accepted.

And before they turned aside to go, Giles paused and took both her hands in his. It was at the feet of the dear, silly Virgin in her white and blue and gold that he made his promise: “Darling, you shall lose nothing, nothing that I can help. It will never be alone that you’ll come for those holidays. If you take England for me, you must give me all that you can of France.—Everything that is sacred to you, is sacred to me, too.”