“But it will be very nice,” she said. “We can make our tea up here, all by ourselves, just as we like it. And I’ve brought a box of cakes from Sherry’s, the sort you like.”
Andrée was sitting at the piano, weary and a little dishevelled.
“It will be nice,” she said. “Better than going down to the tea-room, or having a tray sent up.... Gosh! I’ve been practicing over two hours!”
Al smiled.
“Doesn’t she look like a musical genius?” he asked Claudine. “With that hair?”
“Give me a cake!” said Andrée. “Mr. MacGregor came in last evening, Mother, and we played until someone downstairs asked us to stop.... But this one part of ‘Thais’ is lovely, even with a piano alone, isn’t it? We’re going to hear it again to-night.”
Claudine announced that the tea was ready and Andrée came over to sit beside her on the sofa. Al waited on them with a clumsiness which Claudine found very pitiful; she saw too that he was attempting an improvement in manners, not in a shamefaced way, as another man might have done, but carefully and frankly, watching them with earnestness.
Andrée rose.
“Come into the bedroom, won’t you, Mother?” she said.
Claudine followed her into the little room, so bare, so impersonal, and stood for a moment by the window looking out over Central Park, bright under a new fall of snow.