The Bent Twig

by Dorothy Canfield Fisher

Half an hour later, she sat, fresh from a hot bath, breathing out delicately a reminiscence of recent violet water and perfumed powder; fresh, fine under-linen next her glowing skin; shining and refreshed, in a gown of chiffon and satin; eating her first mouthful of Yoshido's ambrosial soup.

"Why, I'm so sorry," she was saying. "I went out for a walk, and then went further than I meant to. I've been over on the left bank part of the time, in Notre Dame and the Pantheon. And then when I started to come home it took longer than I thought. It's so apt to, you know."

"Why in the world, my dear, did you walk home?" cried Aunt Victoria, still brooding over her in pitying sympathy.

"I'd—I'd lost my purse. I didn't have any money."

"But you don't pay for a cab till you come to the end of your journey! You could have stepped into a taxi and borrowed the money of the concierge here."

Sylvia was immensely disconcerted by her rustic naïveté in not thinking of this obvious device. "Oh, of course! How could I have been so—but I was tired when I came to start home—I was very tired—too tired to think clearly!"

This brought them all back to the recollection of what had set her off on her walk. There was for a time rather a strained silence; but they were all very hungry—dinner was two hours late—and the discussion of Yoshido's roast duckling was anything but favorable for the consideration of painful topics. They had champagne to celebrate her safe escape from the adventure. To the sensation of perfect ease induced by the well-chosen dinner this added a little tingling through all Sylvia's nerves, a pleasant, light, bright titillation.

All might have gone well if, after the dinner, Felix had not stepped, as was his wont, to the piano. Sylvia had been, up to that moment, almost wholly young animal, given over to bodily ecstasy, of which not the least was the agreeable warmth on her silk-clad ankle as she held her slippered foot to the fire.

But at the first chords something else in her, slowly, with extreme pain, awoke to activity. All her life music had spoken a language to which she could not shut her ears, and now—her face clouded, she shifted her position, she held up a little painted screen to shield her face from the fire, she finally rose and walked restlessly about the room. Every grave and haunting cadence from the piano brought to her mind, flickering and quick, like fire, a darting question, and every one she stamped out midway, with an effort of the will.

The intimacy between Felix and Aunt Victoria, it was strange she had never before thought—of course not—what a hideous idea! That book, back in Lydford, with Horace Gilbert's name on the fly-leaf, and Aunt Victoria's cool, casual voice as she explained, "Oh, just a young architect who used to—" Oh, the man in the Pantheon was simply brutalized by drugs; he did not know what he was saying. His cool, spectral laugh of sanity sounded faintly in her ears again.