"The Latin Quarter is full of women like that. I know. I have worked for them. I have been cleaning at studios and apartments like yours in this neighborhood ever since I left the stage. I have seen what these women paint. Oh la! la! Sometimes you cannot tell the canvas from the palette, Cubism they call it, to hide the fact that they cannot draw and could not reproduce a figure or any recognizable object to save their lives. No, I'm not talking of beginners. I'm talking about the old ones, the women, Americans and English, who do not know how to paint kitchen chairs or carry a tune, and yet art schools and music academies flourish on their fees. They were misfits where they came from. It pays their relatives to send them money every month so they won't come home. But why should Paris—that is, our part of Paris—be the dumping ground? You say that there are more men of that kind than women? Yes, oh yes, many more. But then, after a certain time men give up posing. They do not mind being taken at their real value. When they are failures, they admit it. The women keep on pretending."
Emilie was as good as her word. With a shining face and hair well slicked back from her ears she appeared at tea time. The ample front was covered by a clean white apron. She stood at my elbow, her black beady eyes keen to see what I needed before I asked for it. Oui, Madame and voilà, Madame came as softly as though, born in a pantry, she had always served tea. But she could not keep up the play without the relief of an occasional entr'acte. When she brought me a pot of fresh tea and guests happened to be looking the other way, she would give a broad wink and bolt from the room. When the guests left, the kitchen door was closed.
"I ought to have made one more appearance, Madame," said Emilie a few moments later as she settled herself comfortably in the steamer-chair and took a pinch of snuff. "The model servant would have helped them on with their coats. But I had all I could stand."
"But you did very well, Emilie."
"I got more fun out of it than you did. I said that you were wasting your time on those people. What did they do? Told you you looked badly. Asked why you were so tired. Advised you to get a doctor for the baby's cough. And you think they meant well? That it was solicitude?"
Here Emilie laughed heartily and wiped the snuff off her hands with the greasy blue apron that now replaced the white one.
"You are naïve, dear Madame. Women love to tease each other that way, especially those who are not well or strong themselves. They hate you for not having ills. If you told them that you had a physical examination last week and the doctor said you were in perfect condition, they would shake their heads gravely and warn you that you are underweight for your height."
"They did make me mad, I confess, when they volunteered advice about Scrappie. They used to scold me for nursing my baby and they scolded me to-day when they heard I had stopped nursing her."
"That's it! That's it!" cried Emilie. "Next time they talk like that, show them the little thing, beautiful rose de mai that she is, and ask them in what way she looks badly."
Throughout the year at Twenty-One, Emilie was a tower of strength to me. When we sent our pitchpine back to William Shakespeare and packed our rugs and brasses, she was on hand as she had been the day we set up our Lares and Penates in the Rue Servandoni. She urged that we take her to Constantinople with us. We did, and never regretted it—if only for her comments on the Turks and Greeks and Armenians. When she realized that we needed other care than she could give us, Emilie quietly dismissed herself and went back to France to live in Bordeaux. We see her there occasionally. She still wears my old hats and blouses. She is still a femme de ménage. And Marcelle has continued to wield the flat-iron.