“You were in Normandy when I was in Paris,” David said, wondering if he would have thought to send a box of chocolates to St. Susanna’s if she had been there.
“Normandy! Isn’t it—but you don’t know it!” she said. “It’s heavenly. We have such a cunning little place there; it was a sort of gate-lodge once, and of course we had the sea!—it used to remind me of Wastewater, only of course the sun seemed to set in the wrong direction!——David,” Gabrielle broke off to ask earnestly, “didn’t you find Paris very disappointing?”
“Rucker and I were only there ten days, on our way to Spain, to paint,” David reminded her. “No, I don’t remember that it was exactly—disappointing,” he added, in a tone that made her laugh.
“To me,” the girl said, “Paris was all Dumas and Victor Hugo and Stanley Weyman. I like their Paris the best. Sedans, masked riders, horses waiting in the angles of the walls——It made me almost glad not to see London,” she added, gravely. “Imagine losing Dickens’s London, and Thackeray’s, and Trollope’s! Oh, look,” she said, in a tone rich with affectionate recollection, as they stopped by the old sundial set in a mouldy circle of emerald grass.
“You still like adventure stories?” David suggested, remembering that she always had liked them.
“Not always,” Gabrielle answered. And with a suddenly warming enthusiasm, she recounted to him a story she had read on the boat, one of a collection of short stories.
It was so simple that it hardly engaged his attention at first: the story of two rich little girls, with a marvellous doll’s house, and two poor little girls socially debarred from being asked in to inspect it. Gabrielle described the minute perfections of the doll’s house, the tiny beds and curtains, the marvel of a microscopic glass lamp, and the wistful wonder of the little pariahs, one bold and eager, the other shy, her little head hanging, her little hand always grasping a corner of her big sister’s apron. By chance the poor little girls were offered an opportunity to creep in, and they were rapturously inspecting the wonder when the rich little girls’ mother indignantly discovered them, sent them forth with insulting scorn, sent them shamed and bewildered on their homeward road. And the older child sat by the roadside, heaving with hurt and fury and heat and fatigue, with the little sister close beside her. And the simple story ended quite simply with the little sister’s murmured words of courage and comfort:
“Never mind. I seen the little tiny glass lamp!”
David was an artist, he adored beauty in youth, in words, in voices. Here he found them all combined in this eager creature who ended her tale with tears in her glorious eyes and a smile that asked for his sympathy twitching her splendid mouth. Told so plainly, under the dreaming autumn sky, in the thinning soft autumn sunlight of the old garden, the whole thing had a quite memorable pathos and charm, and when he thought of Gabrielle—as David did often in the days to come—he always thought of her standing by the sundial in the morning freshness, telling him the story of the doll’s house.
She had brushed the face of the dial free of leaves and pine needles and was scraping the deep incisions with a stick.