"Pearly in the treble—clear, clear—try that bar of triplets again. Again! Again! Once more! There, now start at the double bar—like running water. No, not so much shading, ugh! no, that's not classic, let it speak for itself! You don't need to use those theatrical swells and die-aways here. You're not playing Gounod. Start that movement over again. Every note's a pearl, remember, string them together in a necklace. Don't jumble them in a heap."
They were still at it, laboring like slaves, putting their backs into it like ditch-diggers, exalted as young-eyed cherubim, when Jeanne came discreetly to the door to look in on them. This was her decorous method of intimating that she was about to put Marise's dinner on the table.
"Oh, là! là!" cried Mlle. Hasparren, "is it as late as that? And my sister told me to be sure to start early enough to buy some salad for our supper." She slammed on her hat, took her bag, and darted away.
Marise got up, feeling numb, flung her arms high over her head, and stretched herself like a cat, although she knew that like any other vigorous and forthright bodily gesture this would call down a reproof from Jeanne as not being "convenable." But she did not care what Jeanne said to her. She did not care about anything in the world but the deep-rolling waves of rhythm, and the clear tinkling rain of pearls which went on and on in her head as she ate her solitary dinner, and studied her lessons in her solitary room afterwards.
When Jeanne came to set up her bed for the night, she remarked "What a horrid sticky hot day it has been!"
"Has it?" asked Marise, in genuine forgetfulness of the weather. Also, caught up into another world as she was, she forgot for an hour or two all about the white rose-bud.
III
But she was reminded of it as she opened her eyes the next morning. It was her fifteenth birthday and to celebrate it, Jeanne had already been out to the market and brought home a great bouquet of white rose-buds. She was loitering around, pretending to pick up the room, but really waiting to hear what Marise would say, so of course Marise must conquer the nausea that white rose-buds gave her and exclaim that they were lovely, and kiss Jeanne and thank her and lean over them and smell them rapturously. What a lot of this sort of thing there was to do, Marise thought, if you didn't want to hurt people's feelings, or let them suspect things you didn't want them to know.
Jeanne tried to restrain herself to decorum, but her overwhelming jealousy of any one else who touched Marise's life was too much for her, "They're nicer than that one wilted old thing Gabrielle Meunier gave you, hein?" Marise understood then why Jeanne had chosen white rose-buds. Down below the surface where she kept her real feelings she heard a sick sort of laugh. What she said was, with fervor, "Oh, yes, Jeanne, a thousand times better!" (You might as well make it a thousand times while you were about it.)
"Well, I should hope so!" said Jeanne, satisfied at last.