The three sat down, the Maréchale taking the old woman next to her. And she never served a cup of coffee with such pleasure in her life.
In after years she would sometimes tell the story of that old woman on a Sunday morning to an English congregation, and then ask the searching question, "Which of you has ever spent two hours day or night seeking for a lost soul as she did?"
CHAPTER XI
THE PRODIGAL SON
Baron X, the eldest son of the Baron of that name, was born at Bordeaux, and brought up in a family of strict Catholic traditions. He studied at the Collêge de Tivoli and the Lycée, but he cared for little except sport and pleasure. After he had wasted much of his father's substance in riotous living, he was informed that his allowance would be entirely cut off unless he went abroad for a time. Leaving home in disgrace, he sailed for New York, and was beginning to taste the bitterness of exile, when, chancing one day to enter a big restaurant, he was astonished to meet his cousin, the Viscount of X., who, having inherited a fortune of two million francs, was making haste to squander it. Falling upon each other's necks, they at once became companions in pleasure. Giving themselves up to all kinds of insanity, they spent immense sums in a few months.
Baron X was afraid to give himself a single moment of reflection on the enormity of his errors. He was inwardly miserable, and found that everybody else who was pursuing pleasure was as unhappy as himself. One night, at a dance in Montreal, he said to the queen of the ball, admired by everybody for her beauty and charm—
"Would that I could find out how to enjoy myself again!"
She answered, "If I seem to be gay, I have no reason for being so. Oh, how I suffer!"
The young man felt that existence became more and more mechanical, the days succeeding one another in an endless monotony of unsatisfying amusements. He seemed to be living in a bad dream.
After a while he returned to France, and one evening he was sitting, sad at heart, on the balcony of the Café de la Paix, wondering to what place of pleasure he should turn his steps, when some Salvationist girls came to offer their journal to the customers. They were greeted with the usual pleasantries. Baron X asked the waiter if he knew who these people were.