“See here,” hotly, “I don’t know who you are, but I made an ass of myself so that you should enjoy your sweetbreads, and then you rag me about it!”
“I’m sorry,” Merle replied, very penitent. “And I am grateful to you, really. But you didn’t see his ecstatic expression while you bound up the wound. Please forgive me—and let me replace the handkerchief.”
Peter liked this girl with the curious foreign lilt in her accent, and the demure sense of humour. And when a few days later a half-dozen of finely embroidered handkerchiefs arrived, together with a formal invitation to take tea with the sender, she went with a foreknowledge of having at last discovered someone who could speak her peculiarly twisted language.
She found a French bonbon in an exquisite bonbonnière; she found a jewel in its pink-lined casket; she found a dainty little lady, guarded and cherished as is only a “jeune fille” of French extraction; exquisitely dressed; very much in the picture, whether in the Louis-Seize drawing-room, or the Empire boudoir, or on the front seat of her grandmother’s roomy and old-fashioned barouche. And buried deep beneath these ornamentations, she found more of herself than she ever thought to encounter in a fellow-being. So much of herself, that it was almost a shock to vanity.
They did not become Best Friends in the sense of choosing each other’s hats, and walking with interlaced arms. They walked instead with interlaced lives. And from a series of vivid and incongruous patches, Peter now saw it possible to weave the pattern of her existence and Merle’s, so that the minutes were linked to the hours, and the seasons pursued one another the round of the calendar, and every haphazard personage was given a meaning, and every group of persons. And they planned undertakings and carried them through always; and robbed fiction of adventure, to place that wild-haired lass in the setting of things-that-happen. Journeys did they plot, preceded by an elaborate structure of deception for the benefit of Miss Esther Worthing, and an entirely different édition de luxe to satisfy Madame des Essarts; thus necessitating great play for the exercise of their ingenuity. If one mood led them to revel in utterly childish delights, such as raising the golden-syrup spoon high above the plate, so as to let the shining liquid drop in coils and patterns upon the bread, a swift change of circumstances showed the twain in ultra-luxurious furs and ultra-spotless white kid gloves, setting forth solemnly, and with the moral support of a card-case, to “pay calls.” They arranged imaginary “parties,” one for the other; of which Merle’s favourite showed stately Madame des Essarts playing a prominent part with Bertram Kyndersley of the Melting Eye; though Peter inclined more to a fanciful alliance she had promoted between the Sphinx and the Albert Memorial—with dire results to the white flower of a blameless statue’s life.
Merle caught Peter’s infectious trick of light brilliant patter-talk, so that the likeness between the twain was marvellous to those who could not pierce beneath exterior resemblances. It was Peter who invariably started the vein of nonsense, Merle who capped it at the finish. Merle did not breathe the atmosphere as a matter of course; she had too long been nourished in hot-house solemnity, and her witticisms tumbled out with a surprised little lift in the voice, as if in astonishment at their escape from bondage. Nor could she ever learn sublime disregard of the feelings and conveniences of others, but would linger to propitiate the breathless fragments scattered by the swift onrush of Peter’s imperial passage; continued, in spite of her friend’s laughing remonstrances, to pay reverential homage to white hairs, and display a certain polite hauteur where persons of inferior station were in question. One jested, yes,—mais pas avec les autres! “You deserve to die on the guillotine,” quoth Peter.
But she gave in, notwithstanding her leadership, before the chill of Merle’s little reserves. For—and here lay the sting of the matter—instinct would not lead her exactly to where these reserves lay hidden; she would stumble on them unawares, without the remotest notion for what reason just that particular mention or sally or point of view, should call forth in the other a mood resembling cold water, finely sprayed. Merle herself, thus argued Peter, could on occasions be as daringly demurely blasphemous, so why....
But Peter knew well enough that the careless years she had spent knocking about with her parents and their shoddy coarse-grained good-natured associates, had done their destroying work. It is always absurd to suppose, in the popular fashion, that whatever a girl’s surroundings, her outlook can remain pure and flower-like and uncontaminated. Certain words had to be checked on her tongue; the itch for a cigarette was ever in her fingers; she was familiar with what she termed the “man-look,” and recognized too soon the dawning of intentions that needed to be checked. Other traces there were: a cool disregard as to the state of undress in which circumstances might chance to discover her straight young limbs; meanings of the under-world that attached themselves to perfectly innocent phrases. Not a very profound under-world; just below the glazed surface. And experiences had been hers, squalid enough to give pleasure in the recollection, when balancing a fragile teacup at some opulent afternoon reception.
These after-effects could hardly be considered serious; merely annoying to have perceptions so far blunted as to give no warning on the rare occasions when Merle’s greater fineness was in danger. “I would not have the bloom brushed from your girlhood, my Pepita!”—it amounted to that, after all.