"No, I don't know!" cried Eugenia angrily.
The cab drew up and stopped. "I suppose we're theah," said Eugenia, "you tell him to wait till we come out."
She was cautiously silent during the introduction to Mme. de la Cueva, and during the hour of the lesson. But if she gave her tongue little employment, she kept her eyes busy, absorbing every detail of the long, bare room, with its four long windows opening on a balcony overlooking the little, dank, unkempt Jardin de Cluny. After the lesson, Mme. de la Cueva stepped into another room to get some music, and Marise, rather pale with fatigue, walked wearily out on the balcony for a breath of fresh air. Eugenia sprang to follow her, as if she had been wishing to do this, and had not known if it were allowable. But before she looked down on the medieval building below them she said in a whisper to Marise, "You're dog-tired. Why, I wouldn't work that hard for anybody! And for that fat old dowd!"
Marise looked down at her astonished. "I'm not working for her!" she exclaimed. But this was, evidently, from the look of Eugenia's face a fourth dimensional remark for her, for she made no answer, turning instead to look at the gray-black old mass of Cluny.
"What is it?" Eugenia asked.
Marise had not yet wholly emerged from a struggle with an exercise which she had not been able to execute with the inhuman, neat-fingered velocity demanded by Mme. de la Cueva. The hour in that other world to which music always transported her had broken the continuity of her impressions of her new friend. She stared rather blankly at Eugenia's question, and looked from her to the well-known medieval pile below them. It did not for the instant occur to her, that the other girl did not recognize what the building was. The turn of her phrase suggested an inquiry about the architecture, and though she had never thought about Cluny before, the look of it stirred recollections of a certain fierce history teacher, whose specialty had been the transitions of the reign of Louis XII. She looked down on the stone lacework opposite, and said doubtfully, "What is it? Domestic Gothic, shouldn't you think? But some of it pretty late. Those square dormer-windows are Louis Douze, aren't they?"
She looked away from the Cluny and down at Eugenia as she finished, and had once more a shock of astonishment. The other's eyes were flaming. "Theah, that's it," she said fiercely, showing her white teeth as she spoke, but not in a smile. "That's it. That's just it! Wheah did you learn that?"
She dashed the question in Marise's face as though it had been her fist.
Marise positively drew back from her. Too startled to be anything but literal, she answered, "Why, why, I don't know where I did. Oh, yes, in my French history class, I suppose. They make you learn everything so hard, you know. You yourself were saying what a grind it is."
Eugenia breathed hard and said, "History again, darn it! But I didn't dream you'd learn that sort of thing in it." She added defiantly, and for Marise quite cryptically, "Well, I'm going to learn it without!"