That exclamation of Smith’s last night, to which we all cried taboo, really hit one of the salient points of the position: when I think of the way we treated her in the beginning! Extenuating circumstances might be pleaded for us, no doubt. It was only natural that we should have treated her so, if tradition and convention can make a thing natural—if it is natural that men should glare at a woman in a smoking-carriage, for example. And besides, she has had her revenge. For that matter, she was never conscious of our offences; but she has had her revenge, if to see us one by one prostrate ourselves at her feet, humble adorers, eager servitors,—if that may constitute revenge. And then, we are told, though our sins be as red as scarlet, if we do truly repent, they shall be washed as white as snow: and we have repented, goodness knows how truly. All the same, forgiveness without forgetfulness being but the guinea-stamp without the gold, I wish I could forget the way we treated her in the beginning.
One is judged by the company one keeps; and she kept—ours. It is now some nine months ago that she appeared in it, at the Hôtel de l’.céan et de Shakespere, in the Rue Racine. We were just hasty enough, unobservant enough, blunt enough of perception, to judge her accordingly,—to take for granted, in a casual, matter-of-course fashion, that she would be a vessel of like clay to our own.
The entrance to the Hôtel de l’.céan et de Shakespere, a narrow, dark, ambiguous-looking entrance, is flanked by two tin signs. That at the right hand reads, “Chambres ci Cabinets Meublés,” that at the left, “Pension de Famille.” Call it a Pension de Famille, if you will: at the epoch when Mademoiselle Miss arrived among us, we were, to put it squarely, the most disreputable family in Europe.
Our proprietress, Madame Bourdon, was a gelatinous old person from Toulouse, with a pair of hazy blue eyes, a mottled complexion, a worldly-wise smile, an indulgent heart, and an extremely nasal accent. I speak of her as old; but she wasn’t old enough to know better, apparently. At any rate she had a certain unbeneficed abbé perpetually hanging to her apron-strings, and she kept him to dinner half a dozen evenings in the week. Of her boarders all the men were students, all the women étudiantes,—which, being interpreted, I suppose means students too. There were Mesdames Germaine, Fifine, Olga, Yvonne, Zélie, and Lucile,—
“Whose names are six sweet symphonies,”—and perhaps it was because Lucile was her niece that Madame had dubbed her shop a pension de famille. You paid so much for your room and service, and then you could take table d’hôte or not, as you elected. Most of us took it, because it was only fifty francs a month, vin compris. Our ladies dined abroad a good deal, being inconstant quantities, according to the custom of their sex; but the men were almost always present in full number. We counted seven: Chalks, Schaas-Keym, Aubêmont, Jeanselme, Campbell, Norton, and myself. We formed a sort of close corporation, based upon a community of tastes, interests, and circumstances. We were all “arts,”—except Jeanselme, who was a “mines,” with a disordered tendency to break out in verse: we were all ridiculously poor, and we were all fond of bohemianising up and down the face of Paris.
One evening in September of last year, on entering our salle-à—manger, we beheld a stranger, an addition to our ranks; and Madame, with a comprehensive gesture, introduced her to us in these terms: “Une nouvelle, une anglaise, Mees,...” Then she made awful hash of rather a long-winded English name: and we were content to accept the newcomer simply as Miss. The concierge and the servants, though, (to anticipate a little), treated Miss as a petit-nom, like Jane or Susan, and prefixed the title Mademoiselle. The pleonasm seemed a happy one, and we took it up: Mademoiselle Miss. On her visiting-card the legend ran, “Miss Edith Thorowether.” It was probably as well, on the whole, that French lips should not too frequently have tackled that.
Now if she had been plain or elderly or constrained in her bearing or ill-natured-looking, no doubt we should have felt at once the difference between her and ourselves, and understood her presence with us as merely the outward and visible sign of some inward and spiritual blunder. But, as it happened, she was young and distinctly pretty; and she appeared to be entirely at her ease; and she smiled graciously in acknowledgment of the somewhat cursory nods with which we favoured her. We hadn’t the wit or the intuitions to recognise her ease for the ease of innocence; and our hotel was such a risky box; and ladies of English or American origin were no especial novelty in the Quarter; and we didn’t stop to examine this one critically, or to consider; and so things fell out in a way we now find disagreeable to remember. It was Saul who had strayed by hazard into the midst of our prophetic councils; and we mistook him for one of our own prophetic caste, and proceeded to demean and express ourselves in our usual prophetic manner. Fortunately, Saul’s knowledge of our prophetic tongue was limited. We spoke the slang of the Boulevards; whilst the little French that Mademoiselle Miss was mistress of she had learned from Ollendorf and Corinne.
The situation was partially cleared up, I forget how long afterwards, by our discovering in her room, whither she had bidden us for an evening’s entertainment, an ancient copy of a certain Handbook to Paris,—“the badge of all our tribe,” as the tourist called it. On opening to its list of hotels (which somebody did by chance), we found the following note, with a pencil-mark against it: “Hotel de l’.céan et de Shake-spere, Rue Racine, chiefly frequented by visitors pursuing art-studies: well spoken-of and inexpensive.” That explained it. Mademoiselle Miss had trusted to a guide that was ten years behind the times: so the date on the title-page attested. And in ten years how had the Hôtel de l’.céan et de Shake-spere fallen from its respectable estate!—unless, ten years ago, the editor of that most exemplary handbook had been egregiously imposed upon. In his current edition the paragraph that I have cited does not appear.
But to return to the evening of her arrival. In our salle-à-manger there was a rigid division of the sexes. The men sat on one side of the long table, the women on the other, with ‘Madame and her abbé cheek by jowl at the head. It was the only arrangement Madame had been able to effect, whereby to maintain amongst us something resembling order. Mademoiselle Miss had a seat assigned to her between Zélie and Yvonne, nearly opposite Chalks and myself; and she entered without embarrassment into conversation with all four of us. That is to say, she responded as well as she could in her broken classic French, and with perfect amiability, to such remarks as we directed at her. Save in addressing Madame or the abbé, nobody ever thought of saying vous at our unceremonious board; and Miss showed neither displeasure nor surprise when we included her in the prevailing tu. She had a quiet, sweet, English voice; an extremely delicate complexion, pale rose merging into lily-white (which we, I dare say, assumed was due to a scientific management of rouge and powder); a pair of large gray eyes; a lot of waving warm-brown hair; and a face so smooth of contour, so soft and fine in texture, that one might have thought her a mere girl of eighteen,—or twenty at the utmost,—whereas, in point of fact, as we learned later on, she was twenty-three.
On this first evening of her arrival, however, neophyte though she was, we observed her with no special care, paid her no special attention, nor felt any special curiosity regarding her. Ladies of the quality we tacitly ascribed to her were such an old, old story for us; familiarity had bred apathy; we took her for granted very much as we might have taken for granted an addition to the number of chairs in the room. Besides, an attitude of nil-admirari towards all things, and particularly towards all things new, is the fashion of the Quarter; an attitude of torpid omniscience, of world-weary sophistication. We have seen everything, dissected everything, satisfied ourselves that stuffed with sawdust. We are fin-de-siecle, we are décadents, and we are Anglomaniacs to a man. To evince surprise at anything, therefore, or more than a supremely languid interest in anything, is what, when we are on our guard, most of us would die rather than do. Hence the questions that we put to Miss were few, desultory, superficial, and served in no wise to correct our misappreciation of her; whilst, together with the affirmative propositions that we laid down, they pre-supposed a point of view and a past experience similar to our own.