He observed that Mademoiselle Vicaud, though speaking English with fluent ease, had in her voice and manner some most un-English qualities. Her voice was soft, deep, and a little guttural. She had a way, he noticed later on, of saying “Ah” when one talked to her, a placid little ejaculation that was curiously characteristic and curiously foreign.
But at the moment further observations were arrested. The door opened, and rising, as a swift footfall entered the room, Damier found himself face to face with his lady of the photograph.
He blushed. His emotion showed itself very evidently on his handsome, sensitive face, so evidently that the strangeness of the meeting made itself felt as a palpable atmosphere, and made conventional greetings an effort and something of an absurdity. Madame Vicaud, however, dared the absurdity, and so successfully that the formal sweetness of her smile, the vague geniality of her voice, as she said right things to him, seemed effortless. Damier, through all the tumult of his hurrying impressions, comparisons, wonders, yet found time to feel that she was a woman who could make many efforts and seem to make none. Her manner slid past the stress of the moment; her wonder, if she felt any, was not visible. All that she showed to her sudden visitor, introducing himself through a past that must have been long dead to her, was the smile, the geniality, vague and formal, of the woman of the world.
By contrast to this atmosphere of rule and reticence, the few words he had exchanged with the daughter seemed suddenly intimate—seemed to make a bond where the mother’s made a barrier. But above all barriers, all reticences, was the one fact—the wonderful fact—that she was she, changed so much, yet so much the same that the change was only a deepening, a subtilizing of her charm.
“Yes, I remember Mrs. Mostyn so well,” said Madame Vicaud, “and it is many years ago now. She must be old. Does she look old? Is she well? Will she come to Paris one day, do you think? Ah, as for my going to England to see her, that is a great temptation, a sufficient one were the possibility only as great. My daughter has been much in England; she really, now, knows it better than I do.”
Mademoiselle Vicaud did not meet her mother’s glance as it rested upon her; her eyes were fixed, with their dark placidity, upon Damier, as she sat sidewise in her chair, her hands—they were large, white, beautifully formed—loosely interlaced on the chair-back.
“Yes; I know England well,” she said—“educational England. I went to school there. I associate England with all that is formative and improving; I have been run through the mold so many times.”
“Run through?” Damier asked, smiling. “Have you never taken the form, then?” He was not interested in Mademoiselle Vicaud, although he felt intimate with her; but her mother’s glance brought her between them, placed her there; one was forced to look at her and to talk to her.
“Do you think I have?” Mademoiselle Vicaud asked, with her smile, that was not gay, a slumberous, indulgent smile. “I hope not,” she added, “physically, at least. I don’t like your English outline, as far as that is concerned.” Damier could but observe that hers was not English. She was supple, curved—slender, yet robust; one saw her soft breathing; her waist bent with a lovely flexibility. But the contemplation of these facts, to which she seemed, with the indifference of perfect assurance, to draw his attention, emphasized that sense of intimacy in a way that rather irritated him; Mademoiselle Vicaud, her outline and her exquisite gowning of it, slightly jarred upon him. He hardly knew how to word his appreciation of her difference, and after saying that he was glad she had escaped the more unbecoming influences of his country, added: “I hope that there were some things you cared to adopt.”
“They adopted me. I was quite passive, quite fluid,” said Mademoiselle Vicaud.