Audrey did not stir.
“Mon Dieu!“ murmured Madame Piriac, “What has she, little one?”
Rosamund said stiffly and curtly:
“She is asleep.... It is very late. Four o’clock.”
Excellent as was Audrey’s excuse for her lapse, Rosamund was not at all pleased. That slumber was one of Rosamund’s rare defeats.
CHAPTER XII
WIDOWHOOD IN THE STUDIO
Audrey was in a white piqué coat and short skirt, with pale blue blouse and pale blue hat—and at the extremity blue stockings and white tennis shoes. She picked up a tennis racket in its press, and prepared to leave the studio. She had bought the coat, the skirt, the blouse, the hat, the tennis shoes, the racket, the press, and practically all she wore, visible and invisible, at that very convenient and immense shop, the Bon Marché, whose only drawback was that it was always full. Everybody in the Quarter, except a few dolls not in earnest, bought everything at the Bon Marché, because the Bon Marché was so comprehensive and so reliable. If you desired a toothbrush, the Bon Marché not only supplied it, but delivered it in a 30-h.p. motor-van manned by two officials in uniform. And if you desired a bedroom suite, a pair of corsets, a box of pastels, an anthracite stove, or a new wallpaper, the Bon Marché would never shake its head.
And Audrey was now of the Quarter. Many simple sojourners in the Quarter tried to imply the Latin Quarter when they said the Quarter. But the Quarter was only the Montparnasse Quarter. Nevertheless, it sufficed. It had its own boulevards, restaurants, cafés, concerts, theatres, palaces, shops, gardens, museums, and churches. There was no need to leave it, and if you were a proper amateur of the Quarter, you never did leave it save to scoff at other Quarters. Sometimes you fringed the Latin Quarter in the big cafés of the Boulevard St. Michel, and sometimes you strolled northwards as far as the Seine, and occasionally even crossed the Seine in order to enter the Louvre, which lined the other bank, but you did not go any farther. Why should you?