Mme. Vallery's move was to sit in the winged, brocaded, deep-cushioned bergère, and motion Marise to sit beside her.
"Let's get our business done and off our hands first of all," she said, smiling up at the tall girl in an admiration as frank as her husband's for Eugenia, and for Marise, vastly more valuable.
The others, in a little chiming burst of chatter and high spirits, moved off towards the balcony. Mme. Vallery glanced after them with an inscrutable expression and then at Marise with a brisk, business-like manner.
The matter at issue just then, the occasion of the girls' call, was a fête de charité at the lycée, over which Mme. Vallery's sister was Directrice, shoved up to that position, so the lycée teachers said, by the political pull of Madame Vallery herself. But even they could not deny that the connection was highly advantageous for the lycée. There was not another one in Paris, which felt itself more "protégé" in high places, more sure of its standing with the Ministry of Education. And its annual charity fête, from being the usual small-bourgeois bazar with home-made aprons and pin-cushions on sale, and perhaps an inexpensive conjuror pulling rabbits out of silk hats in the assembly-room to amuse the children, had become one of the most elaborate and unique annual events of the city. A good part of Tout-Paris lent its highly ornamental presence to these affairs, and helpless before Mme. Vallery's energy and acumen, always left much more of the contents of its purse than it had the slightest intention of leaving in the amusingly decorated stalls where pretty, well-trained amateur salesgirls sold the goods furnished at cost (under pressure from Mme. Vallery), by the most fashionable shops in Paris.
This year Marise had been asked to play, along with two other de la Cueva pupils, in the afternoon concert which was the clou of the three days' fête. Mme. Vallery had written her to ask her to come to talk over the choice of music, and to Eugenia's surprise and extreme pleasure had mentioned casually that she would be glad to see her pretty friend, Miss Mills, also. Marise had instantly wondered what she wanted to get out of Eugenia, and now behind her fresh, open, unlined young face she was hiding a determination to find out what, and to keep Eugenia from being unduly exploited. She might tease Eugenia herself, but she had an elder-sister feeling of protective care towards her. Eugenia was so awfully defenseless, in spite of her money, and so naïve still in spite of the sophisticated lore and manners which she had so energetically acquired. She had not learned that thorough-going suspicion of everything, which is the only valid protection against life.
But Mme. Vallery said nothing whatever about Eugenia, other than to comment in passing on how excessively pretty she was, a real late-Régence type, such as one seldom sees nowadays. Marise found herself, as usual, quite helpless before the Vatican antechamber suavity of the older woman, and reflected, not without some resentment, that she probably seemed as naïve to Mme. Vallery, as Eugenia did to her.
After some desultory talk about other features of the fête, they got out a pile of music, went together to the piano, where Marise tried the effects of various combinations, and finally decided on a desirable one.
All this time M. Vallery and Eugenia spent on the balcony, leaning over the railing, the sound of their voices and occasional laughter coming in pleasantly through the open windows. They came in together, when Mme. Vallery summoned them to share the Muscat and hard sweet biscuits which it was part of her genre to serve at four o'clock instead of the newly introduced tea.
"Business is over," she announced, settling herself in the chair back of the little stand, where the tray stood. "Now for some talk." She put her hand to the crystal carafe and held it there for a moment. Another of the ecclesiastical details of her appearance was the beauty of her hands, white and shapely.
M. Vallery seated the girls and then himself, smiling into his beautiful, glistening brown beard. Eugenia too was smiling, with a dazzled look of pleasure. Mme. Vallery looked down at the wine she was pouring. Marise suppressed a qualm of distaste for M. Vallery, and started the talk by laughing outright as at a sudden recollection of something comic. She explained that she had just had a letter from America, from an old cousin of her father, who always kept her au courant of the quaint and humorous goings-on of the country-side.