Along the gravel-walk, inside the Luxembourg, under the hedge of lilacs, under the new splendor of the great beech, a young man and a girl in a pale gray dress were strolling. They looked at each other, and smiled.
"That's the way my father and mother probably walked together," thought Marise, wincing. "That" was one of the clumsiest, most obvious parts of the general conspiracy to fool you. But when you had the key to the code, as Marise had, there was little danger that you would be taken in.
"I think I hear them coming," said Eugenia, "I do hope Monsieur is with her! Not that he ever condescends to pay the slightest attention to me!" She assumed carefully a pose of unconscious ease on her small, spindle-legged chair. Marise turned around from the window and looked at her with appreciation. Was it only two years ago, that Eugenia had scrambled up from the crumpled bed on which she had lain a-sprawl?
"Nobody can say your genre is not decorative, Eugenia," she remarked with the sincere intention of pleasing the other girl, "that's a perfectly glorious toilette, just right. And oh, how divinely that broadcloth is tailored."
Eugenia looked at her resentfully, with a flash of her old suspicion that she was not being treated as an equal.
"I haven't any cachet, and you know it," she said, "if Mme. Vallery can have cachet do you suppose I'm going to be satisfied with just chic?"
Marise felt one of her claps of laughter rising within her, but kept it back, as the beautifully proportioned paneled door opened to admit their hostess. A tall, spare, stooped, gray-haired woman, dressed plainly in fine black, with a shrewd, wrinkled, fresh-colored face, well-washed and guiltless of the smallest trace of powder. She looked like an elderly Jesuit, one who wields a great deal more power than he likes to show.
"Good-day, my children," she greeted the girls in a clear voice, with the utmost simplicity and directness of intonation. "Have we kept you waiting long? I told Auguste that we were a little late."
Auguste, magnificently tall and magnificently bearded, having now followed her in, the four sacramental hand-shakes were accomplished, Eugenia's this time the promptest of all.
After the equally sacramental exchange of salutations and questions and answers had been achieved, questions as to health and general news, which did not in the least denote any interest in these matters, answers which were pronounced with perfunctory indifference and received in the same way, the necessary civilized preliminaries were considered disposed of, and the first moves of the game could be taken. M. Vallery's gambit was to say, looking admiringly at Eugenia, "Such a piece of the month of May oughtn't to be within four walls. Come over to the balcony a moment, and let me show you your sister, the Luxembourg, in flower."