With what pity he recalled the environment in which he had lived! There were all his chance friends. Suzanne, who was really good, and skeptical only because she had seen too early the bad side of life. Poufaille was too simple; to have made an intimate friend of him would have been to tie a cannon-ball to one’s leg. Charley was too much of a bluffer. As to Helia—ah, Helia! He was grateful to her from the bottom of his heart for the simple love which he had once had for her—a love whose remembrance had protected him all through his first years in Paris. For him it had been a romance, without reproach, candid and loyal, and not a passion that would follow him through life like a remorse. His romance—Phil was sure of it—had nothing in it that was not noble. Yes, Helia would always have a place apart in his heart; she would be a sweet memory. Forever, all through his life, she would be his friend and he would forever be a brother to her.
But time had passed. Helia herself had changed. He saw it clearly during her visit to him in his studio on the morrow of the Quat’z-Arts Ball. Ah, how far away were the days when she had been his sweetheart—how many things had passed since then! Now Ethel ruled in his life. He felt himself very little in her presence. For her he had the same admiration which Helia once had for him.
Miss Rowrer was the first society girl whom he had known; for he had led a solitary life in the Chesapeake manor, and in Europe his over-timidity had always held him socially aloof. During his years as a student he had neither opportunity nor leisure. It was only now that he began to understand the charm of the social world. The instincts of his good breeding were awakened. Life seemed beginning for him; he felt like a man back from exile. Contact with Miss Rowrer refined him, and even his art was idealized. It was no longer physical beauty alone which attracted him: there was the moral side; for Ethel put character far above talent, and the two together above everything else.
After this automobile ride which his black eye had earned for him, others followed. Usually Will, the brother, was himself the conductor, as a matter of prudence. That intoxication of speed which gives weak minds the illusion of energy was unknown to him. Once, however, he got into the auto with them and allowed the mechanician to take charge. It was a day when Mme. de Grojean and Mlle. Yvonne, her daughter, had accepted the invitation to take a ride with them. After that Mlle. Yvonne and her mother returned to their province, so that the most part of the time Ethel and grandma had the company only of the duke or Phil, and now and then of M. Caracal.
They saw Auteuil and Chantilly, and took part in an automobile gymkhana for polo at the Bois de Boulogne. At the Longchamps races Miss Rowrer, like a great favorite, was the target of the field-glasses. It was there she met Charley, faultlessly correct, having stripped himself for the day of his bohemian clothes. Charley, who knew Ethel, passed in vain near her again and again to have her recognize him.
The automobilists were seen everywhere from Versailles to Vincennes. The trip around the world was too commonplace. They made the trip around Paris, passing its fifty-seven gates, past its ten railways, its two waterways, through its two forests and more than thirty quartiers, which sum up the luxury and industries of all the cities of the world—London at La Râpée, Chicago at La Villette, Antwerp at the Canal de l’Ourcq.
At St. Denis Caracal gave them the history of what they were seeing. He showed them the effigies of kings mutilated in the Revolution, at the time when Choisy-le-Roi changed its name to Choisy-sur-Seine and Montmorency to Etienne, since there were no longer kings or nobles—“two things they would have done better to keep,” the duke observed.
“They would probably still be here if they had been worth keeping,” answered Ethel.
They dined in a tree at Robinson and rode on donkeys at Romainville. The outings of Parisians in villages with charming names—Marne-la-Coquette, Fontenay-aux-Roses, Les Lilas—were pleasing to Ethel.
“Space opens up ideas! You will find it so, Monsieur le Duc, and you too, Phil, if you do us the pleasure to hunt the moose on our Canadian lands. How free one feels there—not a hedge, not a barrier between us and the north pole!”