Mes amies, we have often read and studied this marvelous passage together, and now I can only say to you that it is true! But every bit of culture means so much more to me than it ever did before and now that I know what European life is, I can understand why they are more cultured than we are. It is because they have leisure. Here the working classes expect to work, as our American working class does not. And the material cares are just taken right off the shoulders of the upper classes. We are expected to occupy ourselves with higher things. I am reading, reading, reading as never before, and getting a closer knowledge of French literature, even than our studies together gave me. It all means so much more to me, now that I am right among the very people who are described in it. Think of looking up from a volume of Zola, and having a caller come in, who might be a character right out of the book. I often tell Mr. Allen, that the life around me illustrates and explains the literature, and the literature illustrates and explains the life. It is a wonderful, wonderful experience!
I have just finished De Maupassant's "Notre Cœur," and I am not surprised that we found it impossible to get hold of the French edition in America. Our strait-laced, old-fashioned, Puritanic America doesn't know enough to appreciate such a picture of this free European world, where relations between men and women are different from those between high school boys and girls. At home the girls rule the roost, if you will excuse a vulgar expression. But not here. Here they are put off in a corner, till they get a husband, and then they are allowed to blossom out. A woman of my age, so a French gentleman told me the other day, is considered just at the right age for being fascinating. And he assured me he didn't say that because it might apply to me, but because it is so. The men have temperament here. They really look at you, and are just as different as can be from the American business-man who never thinks of any woman but his wife, and never pays any attention to her! Here the men positively sparkle in conversation, and they all say they would hardly know I am an American, I have acquired the French manner so entirely. Here a woman is not expected to have become a mummy, because she puts on a wedding-ring. Quite the contrary, I assure you!
But this is a terribly long letter. I have poured out my heart to you in untrammeled spontaneity, such as comes to you in the free intellectuality of this finished civilization.
May you all be able some day to enjoy it!
Your devouée friend,
Flora Allen.
P.S.—Mr. Allen says the business part seems to be all right.
CHAPTER X
As happens to us all, there were certain moments which stayed alive in Marise's memory for years; and as is always the case, those moments did not at all correspond with apparently important events. Such events come, seem of great consequence, happen, and therewith sink down into the featureless mass of things which happen only once and then are in the past forever. The other moments, those queerly, heterogeneously tumbled-together impressions, are the things which happen over again every time one thinks of them.
One of Marise's fantastic notions was that the things which had happened were piled up in a big junk-heap in your memory in front of a great black curtain. But there were pinholes in the curtain, and if you put your eye to one, there, right before you, one of the things that had happened was alive again, and your heart knocked and your throat felt queer just as it did the first time. This notion may have come to her in this form because it was generally in the night that she experienced the vivid living-over of some long past moment. Wakened from a sound sleep by the hoarse whistle of one of the steamers in the Adour, taking advantage of a favorable tide to weigh anchor and be off, she saw in the instant while she drew a long breath and turned over in bed, one of those living scenes again, as actual, as piercingly real to her as though it were happening for the first time. Some of these she greatly dreaded, some set her to ringing all through with happiness, others she never understood at all.