It was her age of discovery. She discovered the Louvre, and love, and Wagner, and Marcel waves, and Mounet-Sully, and Botticelli, and how to put on a hat. She was greedy. She swallowed enough to give her indigestion for years, as indeed it did, and still, like a fledgeling, squawked for more; but she enjoyed her own insatiability. If she could have had Justin, the imaginary, perceptive Justin, to talk to once a week, she would have been happy. She always missed Justin.
But among the endless other things she had also discovered that a year has only fifty-two weeks in it, fifty-two series of seven definite days; that it is no interminable road disappearing into the mists of the future; that it is no more, indeed, than a streaking drive down a Paris street, with busy months to right and left of her, like shops that she had no time to explore. Terrible, how time went, when there was much to see, and do, and learn, before she went back to Brackenhurst. Dear old Brackenhurst! She meant to reform Brackenhurst. Justin would back her.... Lectures in the schools on—oh, you know, interesting people—Corneille and Racine and Anatole France (she was nothing if not catholic) and some really decent recitations at the penny readings.... And the drawing-room must be done up ... black walls and futurist cushions ... and get rid of the Landseers.... She should enjoy herself when she returned to Brackenhurst—if Justin backed her.... She wondered what he would say to the way she did her hair?... She couldn’t think why Aunt Adela wrote such fussy letters about finding Brackenhurst quiet? Because she had been to the opera twice in a week, she supposed.... But Aunt Adela wouldn’t understand how absurdly cheap—and besides, she had paid for it herself out of her birthday tip.... Aunt Adela needn’t think she didn’t realize how good it was of Gran’papa to send her to Paris.... Aunt Adela might know she would be careful.... But a franc was only tenpence, not a shilling ... and she had sold the picture she had been copying at the Louvre ... a lady, an American, had come up and liked it and bought it! Three pounds—seventy-five francs! Gran’papa needn’t send her any more pocket-money: she could last for months on that.... As for finding Brackenhurst quiet, she meant to turn the loose-box into an atelier when she got back, and paint the entire village. She wondered if Gran’papa would sit to her?... A beard was such a comfort ... mouths were always the trouble....
All this in the first months. But you can see how the old sullen, childish distrust of everybody was wearing itself out. She was astonished to find that people were inclined to like her at sight, and, intrigued by such original behaviour, she unbent, responded, and ended by acquiring in her turn a habit of appreciation.
She liked life. She liked her pension. She liked the courteous French girls and the bravura Americans, and their world of scent, and powder, and trim waist belts, and Smart Sets, and candy, and complicated love affairs. It amused her immensely, and did not for an instant impress her as having anything to do with real life. Real life was the other side of the Channel. Unconsciously, however, the views of her fellows, and the books they read, their surreptitious cigarettes, and their ready and untruthful tongues, had a certain influence. She read La Rochefoucauld, with a “Yes, indeed,” expression that might have tickled even that disillusioned gentleman, bought a powder-puff and sometimes remembered to use it, told a lie or two and was never found out. That impressed her. In Brackenhurst one at least had conscience-ache. She acquired a bosom friend and defended, upon occasion, two solid and reform-clad Germans from the rest of the dormitory. In return she discovered that they had adored her for weeks. She liked that. She discovered that she could talk musingly and without effort, that it was perfectly easy to be at the top of her classes. In spite of her foreignness she became the show pupil—and she liked that too. She wished that Justin could see her sometimes.... She discovered that she could act (indeed some devil dispossessed her at charades and dressing-up, lurked behind her eyes, rapturous and Bacchanal), that she could string words together for the school plays, that she had a pretty voice, that she could captain an emergency, that, in short, she was a success. This was perfectly delightful! She only wished there were a way of telling Justin exactly what a charming person every one thought her, without appearing conceited. She tried, in one or two letters, but it couldn’t be done. She had to tear them up.
She heard from Justin sometimes. They corresponded in sets of threes and fives—letter, answer, letter—or letter, answer, letter, answer, letter—and then a pause of months. His half sheets, terse, generalizing, almost void of personality, were the events of her exile, a double source of delight. They were Justin’s letters and—they had to be answered! It was in the code, you see, that you only wrote to Justin turn and turn about, and never twice running, except birthdays and Christmas and Easter or anything special, like sending a New Year parcel to Mrs. Cloud, or when you hadn’t heard for a very long time; because letters bored Justin. And besides——
Certainly a changing Laura, though she herself could not have explained to you the meaning of that “and besides——”
That she was homesick for him or for home—but indeed the two words were synonyms to her—we already know; but when the prospect of a finishing school had been first mooted, she had made up her curious mind, so plastic and yet so stubborn, that she would not be silly again as she had been when she was young (surely the Great Gulf is fixed between twelve and sixteen) and that it was worth her while to buy with only two black years the chance of growing as good and great and wise as Justin—that is to say, nearly as good and as great and as wise. She knew her limitations. And then, when she came back, she would be able to be friends with Justin—real friends—not a little girl to be played with any more.... She would be ‘adequate’.... She was very jealous of that adjective. “Adequate! Oh, an awfully adequate chap!”... Justin was always saying that people he approved were “adequate”.... Very good.... He should say so of her.... To that end, behold her tethered, a willing sacrifice, to a French Grammar and verbs of unmentionable irregularity!
Also, a second motive for docility, there were studios in Paris—pictures—statues of the gods—teachers of the Arts—one Rodin and a thing called a Salon. She might learn to paint, really paint!
She got her way. She had been sent to a quiet, middle-class pension, owned by intelligent women, who taught the newcomers themselves, while the French girls and the more advanced foreigners attended various classes. It was easy to find a studio for Laura.
And so, for nearly two years, she worked three days a week, and for three days sat enchanted, soaking herself in strange oils, smeared from her eyebrows to her aching palette thumb, painting portraits and dreaming dreams. And tragic Monsieur La Motte, that great artist who could not paint, who taught victoriously by word of mouth, because his art must out and his hands could not obey him, Monsieur La Motte, swan-herd fallen on hard times, yet ever alert for a cygnet in the gaggle of geese he must drive for a living, Monsieur La Motte watched and peered and waited. At last, when her two years were nearly at an end, and the studio-talk that frothed like a fountain was less of Cubism and the expensiveness of rose-madder, Ingres, Bergson, Strindberg, symbolic colour schemes and the Eternal Return (for they were an enquiring, philosophical crew) and more and more and ever more of England and its delectable villages, high in the Kentish hills, he could contain himself no longer. He assumed his conspiratorial hat and went, then and there, to call upon his old friends the Demoiselles Dunois.