What should I do with myself, decided as I was to break, anyhow temporarily, the spell of perilous inaction in which I had become entangled? I strolled aimlessly into the Bois de Boulogne, where the sweepers were at work with their long thin brooms, ruffling the untidy grass which Paris never learns to shave and trim. Loitering slowly on, I heard hurried footsteps behind me, and turned to encounter Marion.
She was mottled in the face—agitation always made her so—and she breathed noisily. Even in that surprised moment I could not help mentally criticising the figure she presented, and uttering a secret thanksgiving that she was my sister only by courtesy. A brother in fact had had reason to feel small pride in the connexion, though in this matter of family credit little allowance is usually made for that unnatural creature’s feelings. Yet I thought I could appreciate the hot anguish of gilded youth forced to chaperon, fraternally and shamefully, a figure so aggressively undesirable as this. She had, it is true, conceded to fashion a hat of the feminine swashbuckler type, which blinded one eye and aggravated the inflammatory defiance of the other; but the scornful plainness of her costume and her flat-heeled stride hopelessly discounted any half compromise with custom her head might display. If there is one thing I detest in women it is the long-skirted jacket, and Marion’s was so long that it left a quite inconsiderable fringe of dress between its end and her strong ankles.
“Walk on,” she said, panting for breath: “don’t stop, but walk on.”
We turned towards the lake; there were few people about, and the morning was still and misty. Presently she opened upon me in her authoritative way:—
“What are you doing here, Felix Dane?”
I glanced at her, amused, raising my eyebrows.
“You are not asking that seriously, Marion?”
“Yes,” she said, compressing her lips, “I am.”
“My dear Marion; I am doing nothing, then, but just pleasing myself.”
“I happened to be looking from a window,” she said, “and I saw you asking a boy to point you out the house.”