M. Vaudoyer sat down abruptly, and reaching for a large red-and-white checked handkerchief, mopped his bald head and perspiring face with it. He was evidently containing himself with difficulty and waiting till he could be sure of speaking with moderation before he opened his lips.
Eugenia explained to Marise with dignity, glad of the opportunity to state her case, "I come to M. Vaudoyer for lessons in diction. I don't come to study singing or seventeenth-century history. I hate history and all those dull studies. I don't see why everybody should always be trying to force me into them. M. Vaudoyer gets very angry because I will not practise singing lessons and because I cannot find the time to spend hours in the Bibliothèque Nationale reading all about everything that happened in Molière's time. What do I care what happened in Molière's time? What I want, what I am paying for, is a very simple thing. Instruction in French diction. I don't see that I am getting it."
Her accent showed that she considered her case unassailably good and reasonable.
M. Vaudoyer listened with attention, looking at her very hard, and when she had finished he nodded, "You are right, Miss Mills. I am not the teacher for you. I am a poor, old, impractical Frenchman, incapable of satisfying a practical American girl, who knows what she wants and has the money to buy it. You are the race of the future, you Americans, I of the past. There is no common ground between us." He spoke mildly. Eugenia stared. Marise winced.
"What do you mean, M. Vaudoyer?" asked Eugenia. "Are you sending me away?"
He said with a little smile, "You have sent me away, Miss Mills, far away. And as to what I mean, if you like, I will try to tell you. But you will not understand. I cannot talk the American language. I can only speak the French language." He paused, wiping his perspiring forehead again with his checked handkerchief. "There are two parts to every art. One is the thorough command of your medium; the other is the personality you express through your medium. Neither has the slightest value without the other. Neither is to be had without paying the price of all you have ... all, all!
"You must have perfect command of your medium, just in itself, as a tool. Listen," he stood up, his heavily jowled face grim and stern, drew a long breath, as if he were about to speak, and then as at a sudden thought, paused, the expression of his face changing with comical suddenness to a broad smile, and began to laugh. The girls stared at him in amazement, wondering if he had taken leave of his senses. Apparently something very funny had popped into his mind, just as he was about to go on with his statement to them. It must have been really very funny indeed, for he could not stop his laughter, try as he might. It was too much for him. Both hands on his hips, throwing back his head, he pealed out an irresistible, "Ha! Ha!" as though he would burst if he did not laugh. Seeing their astonished faces, he tried to stop to tell them the joke, choked himself down to rich chuckles, opened his mouth to speak, and, the joke striking him afresh, went off again in a huge roar of mirth that made them both smile and then laugh outright in sympathy.
At this, his face instantly resumed its sad, stern expression, and he was looking at them severely as before, breathing quickly, it is true, as though he had been running, but without a trace of any feeling.
"There you see," he said drily. "That is an example of what I mean by command of a medium. To be master of my tool I must not only be able to laugh, when I feel like it, but whenever I need to laugh, whether I feel like it or not. And I assure you, young ladies, I do not feel in the least like laughing now, having had this glimpse of the future as it will be, shaped to the American mold, by the people of the future."
The girls were stricken silent by all this, their lips, frozen in astonishment, still curving in the set smile that was all that was left of their foolish, induced mirth. Marise was nettled and angry. He had no business playing tricks like that on them. She had been made to appear foolish, horribly foolish, and she resented it.