“Her father!” cried Zizi, and she was about to continue, when it occurred to her to respect Elinor’s unsophistication. She gave me a furtive wink, and said, gravely, “Oh, her father lives in the twenty-first arrondissement.” Elinor was not aware that the arrondissements of Paris number only twenty, and so she could not realise either the double meaning or the antiquity of this evasion.
Zizi’s room was precisely like a thousand other rooms in the Latin Quarter, though rather more luxurious than most: much more so than mine, for example. To begin with, she had a carpet, her private property, a sober-hued Brussels carpet, that covered almost the entire floor; then she had four chairs, each practicable and reasonably fresh-looking; her bed was enriched by a counterpane of crimson silk, and crimson too were the hangings over it. The walls were decorated in the prevailing style of her class and epoch, with tambourines, toy trumpets, empty bonbon boxes, and so forth, hung from tin-tacks. But the chief impression that you got of the room was one of cleanliness and order: Zizi, still for all slips of hers, was French.
“How very neat it is, how exquisitely neat,” Elinor murmured, in evident surprise.
Zizi smiled complacently,—with what they call proper pride. “Pas mal, hein? Asses chic, eh?” she questioned, whilst her eyes snapped triumphantly.
“Yes,” Elinor admitted, “it is very nice, but—it looks due north.”
And she proceeded to develop her favourite hygienic thesis, to the effect that no one could keep well who lived in a room that had no sun, the application being that Zizi must change her quarters. To-morrow, Monday, she must find a room that really did “give to the noon;” and at three o’clock we would meet her at the Vachette, and go with her to inspect it. Of course we were to pay the rent.
“My dear Elinor,” I said, when we had taken leave of Zizi, “I am sorry to discourage you, but your benevolent schemes will come to nothing. She won’t change her lodgings, and she won’t change her mode of life. We would much better have given her a little ready cash, and got rid of her. An endeavour to be respectable, if only ad interim as it were, would weary her too much. You rashly promised to see that she wanted for nothing. Can you see that she has plenty of excitement?—which is the breath of her nostrils. To-morrow she will draw back; she will tell you that on the whole she finds she can’t accept your bigger offer, and will renew her request for fifty francs.”
“If I didn’t know you weren’t, I should think you were a perfectly soulless cynic,” was Elinor’s rejoinder.
But, cynic or no cynic, I was right. Elinor, in agreeing to meet Zizi at Vachettes on the morrow, had forgotten a previous engagement, which she remembered afterwards; so I went to the rendezvous alone, charged, however, with full powers to act as I might deem best. Zizi was a quarter-hour late, but she didn’t mind that, apparently; at any rate she vouchsafed no apology for having kept me waiting. She made haste to let me know that she couldn’t possibly change her lodgings; she hadn’t even looked for others: her mother wouldn’t hear of it, for one thing; and then—her friends? They all have mothers, somehow or other, though the notion seems incongruous: yet I suppose it’s only natural. Zizi’s was a purple-faced old sage femme from the purlieus of ‘Montmartre. She had taken counsel with her mother, she said, and her mother wouldn’t hear of her changing her abode. And then—her friends? When they came to see her, and found that she had moved, they would be displeased; they wouldn’t follow her up. Business is business, after all, but in our youth we were taught that friendship isn’t. Anyhow, Zizi foresaw herself quite friendless if she moved. “But my room is very well. If you and Madame want to support me, why not support me there?”
I echoed, rather feebly perhaps, Elinor’s lecture on the advantages of sunlight; and in any case, I told her, desirous as Madame and I were to “support her,” we positively declined to permit ourselves that indulgence, unless she took a sunny room: what we really wished was to help her to get well; we were persuaded that she couldn’t get well in a northern aspect; and we had no sort of eagerness to throw our money from the windows. It was pretty clear to me that she had begun to distrust our motives: such unaccustomed kindness, such reckless extravagance, bore on their face a suspicious look.