Nelly Grissard was fat and lively to the point of excess. She never let a waxed floor pass under her without proving herself light of foot. Every ounce of Nelly Grissard was on the jump. Her fingers tapped, her feet fluttered, her bosom heaved; her entire diaphragm swelled with little creakings of whale-bone, lace and taffeta.
She wore feathery things about the throat, had a liking for deep burgundy silks, and wore six petticoats for the “joy of discovering that I’m not so fat as they say.” She stained her good square teeth with tobacco, and cut her hair in a bang.
Nelly Grissard was fond of saying: “I’m more French than human.” Her late husband had been French; had dragged his nationality about with him with the melancholy of a man who had half dropped his cloak and that cloak his life, and in the end, having wrapped it tightly about him, had departed as a Frenchman should.
There had been many “periods” in Nelly Grissard’s life, a Russian, a Greek, and those privileged to look through her key-hole said, even a Chinese.
She believed in “intuition,” but it was always first-hand intuition; she learned geography by a strict system of love affairs—never two men from the same part of the country.
She also liked receiving “spirit messages”—they kept her in touch with international emotion—she kept many irons in the fire and not the least of them was the “spiritual” iron.
Then she had what she called a “healing touch”—she could take away headaches, and she could tell by one pass of her hand if the bump on that particular head was a bump of genius or of avarice—or if (and she used to shudder, closing her eyes and withdrawing her hand with a slow, poised and expectant manner) it was the bump of the senses.
Nelly was, in other words, dangerously careful of her sentimentalism. No one but a sentimental woman would have called her great roomy mansion “The Robin’s House,” no one but a sentimentalist could possibly have lived through so many days and nights of saying “yes” breathlessly, or could have risen so often from her bed with such a magnificent and knowing air.
No one looking through the gratings of the basement window would have guessed at the fermenting mind of Nelly Grissard. Here well-starched domestics rustled about, laying cool fingers on cool fowls and frosted bottles. The cook, it is true, was a little untidy; he would come and stand in the entry, when Spring was approaching, and look over the head of Nelly Grissard’s old nurse, who sat in a wheel-chair all day, her feeble hands crossed over a discarded rug of the favourite burgundy colour, staring away with half-melted eyes into the everlasting fountain, while below the cook’s steaming face, on a hairy chest, rose and fell a faded holy amulet.
Sometimes the world paused to see Nelly Grissard pounce down the steps, one after another, and with a final swift and high gesture take her magnificent legs out for a drive, the coachman cracking his whip, the braided ribbons dancing at the horses’ ears.