The astonishing creature had apparently begun existence again, and begun it on the plane of art, but this did not prevent the observer within her from taking the same attitude towards her second career as she had taken towards her first. Nothing seemed more meet for Miss Ingate’s ironic contemplation than the daily struggle for style and beauty in the academies of the Quarter.
Audrey made no reply. The morning had been unusually silent, giving considerable scope for Miss Ingate’s faculty for leaving well alone.
“I suppose you aren’t coming out?” added Miss Ingate.
“No. I went out a bit this morning. You know I have my French lesson in twenty minutes.”
“Of course.”
Miss Ingate seized her apparatus and departed. The instant she was alone Audrey began in haste to change into all her best clothes, which were black, and which the Quarter seldom saw. Fashionably arrayed, she sat down and wrote a note to Madame Schmitt, her French instructress, to say that she had been suddenly called away on urgent business, and asking her nevertheless to count the time as a lesson given. This done, she put her credit notes and her cheque-book into her handbag, and, leaving the note with the concierge’s wife, who bristled with interesting suspicions, she vanished into Paris.
The weather was even more superb than on the previous day. Paris glittered around her as she drove, slowly, in a horse-taxi, to the Place de l’Opéra on the right bank, where the grand boulevard meets the Avenue de l’Opéra and the Rue de la Paix. Here was the very centre of the fashionable and pleasure-ridden district which the Quarter held in noble scorn. She had seen it before, because she had started a banking account (under advice from Mr. Foulger), and the establishment of her bankers was situate at the corner of the Avenue de l’Opéra and the Rue de la Paix. But she knew little of the district, and such trifling information as she had acquired was tinged by the natural hostility of a young woman who for over six months, with no compulsion to do so, had toiled regularly and fiercely in the pursuit of knowledge. She paid off the cab, and went to test the soundness of her bankers. The place was full of tourists, and in one department of it young men in cages, who knew not the Quarter, were counting, and ladling, and pinning together, and engorging, and dealing forth, the currency and notes of all the great nations of the earth. The spectacle was inspiring.
In half a year the restive but finally obedient Mr. Foulger had sent three thousand pounds to Paris in the unpoetic form of small oblong pieces of paper signed with his own dull signature. Audrey desired to experience the thrill of authentic money. She waited some time in front of a cage, with her cheque-book open on the counter, until a young man glanced at her interrogatively through the bars.
“How much money have I got here, please?” she asked. She ought to have said: “What is my balance, please?” But nobody had taught her the sacred formula.
“What name?” said the clerk.