“She always was,” answered Dowie. “But she’s fond of us, bless her heart, and it isn’t loneliness like it was before we came.”
“She is not unhappy. She is too blooming and full of life,” Mademoiselle reflected. “We adore her and she has many interests. It is only that she does not know the companionship most young people enjoy. Perhaps, as she has never known it, she does not miss it.”
The truth was that if the absence of intercourse with youth produced its subtle effect on her, she was not aware of any lack, and a certain uncompanioned habit of mind, which gave her much time for dreams and thought, was accepted by her as a natural condition as simply as her babyhood had accepted the limitations of the Day and Night Nurseries.
She was not a self-conscious creature, but the time came when she became rather disturbed by the fact that people looked at her very often, as she walked in the streets. Sometimes they turned their heads to look after her; occasionally one person walking with another would say something quietly to his or her companion, and they even paused a moment to turn quite round and look. The first few times she noticed this she flushed prettily and said nothing to Mademoiselle Vallé who was generally with her. But, after her attention had been attracted by the same thing on several different days, she said uneasily:
“Am I quite tidy, Mademoiselle?”
“Quite,” Mademoiselle answered—just a shade uneasy herself.
“I began to think that perhaps something had come undone or my hat was crooked,” she explained. “Those two women stared so. Then two men in a hansom leaned forward and one said something to the other, and they both laughed a little, Mademoiselle!” hurriedly, “Now, there are three young men!” quite indignantly. “Don’t let them see you notice them—but I think it rude!”
They were carelessly joyous and not strictly well-bred youths, who were taking a holiday together, and their rudeness was quite unintentional and without guile. They merely stared and obviously muttered comments to each other as they passed, each giving the hasty, unconscious touch to his young moustache, which is the automatic sign of pleasurable observation in the human male.
“If she had had companions of her own age she would have known all about it long ago,” Mademoiselle was thinking.
Her intelligent view of such circumstances was that the simple fact they arose from could—with perfect taste—only be treated simply. It was a mere fact; therefore, why be prudish and affected about it.