Both Aurora and Estelle were craning toward the speaker in a curiosity full of sympathy.
Leslie was used to seeing them hang on her lips. “I do love to hear you talk!” Aurora candidly said. “It doesn’t make any difference whether I know what you’re talking about, it fascinates me, the way you say things!” And the compliment disposed Leslie to talk to them no otherwise than she talked with Lady Linbrook or Countess Costetti, leaving them to grasp or not her allusions and fine shades. She was by a number of years the youngest of the three drawn up to the fire; yet some advantage of fluency, collectedness, habit of good society–a neat effect altogether of authority, made her seem in a way the oldest.
“Violet,” she began, like a grown person willing to indulge children with a story, “is Madame Balm de Brézé’s sister. You saw Madame de Brézé that Friday evening at our house. Violet is very like her, only much younger and a blonde. Amabel is–let us call things by their names in the seclusion of this snug fireside–Amabel is scrawny; Violet was ethereal. Amabel is sharp-featured; Violet’s face was delicate and clear-cut. I say was, because she has grown much stouter. We have known them since they first came to Florence, and have been friends without being passionately attached. They are Americans, but had lived in 78Paris since Violet was a baby. They came here, orphans, because it is cheaper. They used to live on the top floor of a stony old palace in Via de’ Servi, where they painted fans on silk, sending them to a firm in Paris. Amabel did them exquisitely: shepherds and shepherdesses, corners of old gardens, Cupids–Watteau effects, veritable miniature work. The little sister was beginning to do them well, too; she painted only flowers. Amabel had no objection to Violet marrying Gerald. He was as far as possible from being a good match, but in those days both Amabel and Violet seemed to live in an atmosphere that excluded the consideration of things from a vulgar material point of view. Violet and Gerald were alike in that, and so very much alike in their superfine tastes and ways of thinking. Nous autres who live upon this earth wondered how they would keep the pot boiling in case of ‘that not remote contingent, la famille.’ Gerald has an income simply tiny. You would hardly believe how small. We supposed that now he would paint a little more than he ever has done with the idea of pleasing the general public and securing patronage. They were so much in love, anyhow, and made such an interesting pair, that one’s old romantic feelings were gratified by seeing them together. They were to wait until she was twenty-one, when a crumb of money in trust for her would fall due. Then Amabel surprises us all by marrying De Brézé. Violet of course lives with them, and with them goes to Paris. And in Paris she becomes Madame Pfaffenheim. Tout bonnement!”
“Oh, the wretch, the bad-hearted minx!”
“No,” said Leslie, reflectively. She turned from the warmth of the fire and let her eyes rest on the gray sky seen in wide patches through the three great windows, 79arched at the top and blocked at the bottom by wrought-iron guards, that admitted into the red and green room such very floods of light–“no,” Leslie repeated. “One is the sort of person one is. The sin is to pretend. I don’t believe Violet knew the sort of person she was until it came to the test. She thought, very likely, that she was all composed of poetry and fine sentiments and eternal love. She wasn’t; and there it is. When she had the chance actually to choose, she preferred money, a fine establishment, luxury, and she took them. How ghastly if, with that nature concealed in her behind the pearl and pale roses, she had married poor Gerald! It’s much better as it is, don’t you agree with me? I call him fortunate beyond words.”
“Well, of course; that’s one way of looking at it.”
“It’s his way. Gerald knows just how fortunate he has been, and it’s exactly that which makes him so miserable. At first, you understand, he could lay the entire blame on the De Brézés; he was sure they had in some mysterious way constrained her, and though he was angrily, tragically, suicidally wretched, it was one kind of woe–a clean, classic woe, I will call it. He believed it shared by her in the secret of her uncongenial conjugal life. ’Ich grolle nicht,’ he could say, and all that. But a year or two ago she came to Florence with Pfaffenheim on a visit to her sister. I don’t know how Gerald felt, whether he tried to avoid her or tried to see her. That he saw her, however, is certain. She is perfectly happy, my dears, in her marriage! And that she should love Pfaffenheim, or be proud of him, is inconceivable. So her happiness rests entirely upon the fact of her riches and worldly consequence.”
“Say what you please, I call her a nasty, mean thing!” exclaimed Aurora.
80Leslie shrugged her shoulders, as if saying: “Have it your way; but a more philosophical view is possible.”
“She was looking very beautiful,” she went on. “Much more beautiful than before, but in such a different way! From diaphanous she has become opaque; from airy, solid. She brought a most wonderful wardrobe, and, kept in the background with her husband, two fat babies.”