Eugenia caught at her despairingly. "Oh, don't go away. I haven't begun yet! I haven't said a word!" Then struck by another possibility, "Can't I go with you? We could talk in the cab, and I wouldn't say a word at your lesson. Yes, do let me."
"I wasn't going to take a cab," protested Marise, "I don't go round in cabs except when I'm dressed up in the evenings. It would be pretty expensive, ma foi! to take a cab everywhere I went in the daytime. Mostly I walk."
"Oh, I hate to walk, let me take the cab," the other girl begged, beginning hastily to arrange her hair. "I've got plenty of money. It's the only thing I have got." She paused, the brush in her hand. "Haven't you?" she asked, addressing herself to Marise's reflection in the glass.
Marise was passably astonished at the unceremonious question, but answered it simply, "I haven't any of my own. I live with my father. And he hasn't any either, but he makes a good deal, gets a good salary, I mean. He lets me have all I need."
Eugenia's comment on this was to say bitterly, "Think of not knowing more than to ask such a question! I told you I don't know anything. But I can learn. I can learn in a minute if only I get the chance. I learned then ... from the way you looked. I'll never make that fool mistake again."
She pinned on a very pretty, costly hat, and Marise saw that she really did not look like a child, after all. She ran her arm under Marise's now, and gave it an ecstatic squeeze. "Oh, I'm so happy!" she cried, "I wish I could buy you a diamond necklace!"
The talk in the cab as they clattered over the big paving-stones of the quiet, half-deserted left-bank streets turned on the school, and very soon Marise was led to say, "But, see here, I don't believe, Eugenia, you've got into the right school at all. It's not a bit chic, you know, to go to a girl's lycée, and ours is one of the plainest of them all. The teachers are terrible grinds, the girls are fearfully serious-minded. They don't care a thing about their looks. All they want is to pass the competitive exams for the Ecole Normale at Sèvres, and get in there for four more years of grind, lots and lots worse than at the lycée. You'd better believe there's nothing but what France did in India before the English got there, et ainsi de suite."
Eugenia made a gesture of despair. "There!" she lamented, "that's it! Not even to know enough to pick out the right school!"
And then a curious expression of suspicion coming into her eyes, she said skeptically, "but you go to that school! If it's good enough for you...!"
Here again was something in that baffling other dimension, and this time though she understood it as little as ever, Marise did not like it at all. She said stiffly, "I'm going because you can get serious instruction in some things I need to enter the classes at the Sorbonne next year."