One evening, while they were dressing for the Opera, he said to her as she came out of the boudoir and faced him, “It is true what Jacques said at the club to-day. It takes the Parisian to make the clothes and the American to wear them. The Americans are the best dressed women in the world.”
And he looked at her in such a way that she grew warm suddenly in the knowledge that her figure was superb, that her shoulders were marvelously white and beautiful, and that her clothes were perfect. Until lately she had dressed, like most American women, for the sake of other women; now she understood that, without knowing it, she had been dressing of late to please a man, because she had found one who understood the beauty and importance of clothes. There was, despite all her other doubts, great satisfaction in that.
She discovered too that his friends were not among the Americans and the English but among the French and the Russians. She found herself, night after night, at dinners watching him as he stood, straight, dark and handsome, his queer gray eyes wrinkled a little with laughter, talking to some friend who was a foreigner, and at such moments she was aware of his great difference from her own people. He was, in some obscure fashion, linked with that preposterous boudoir and its florid decorations. Perhaps, secretly, he really liked the awful house as much as his mother liked it.
She saw too, with the green eyes which took in everything, that the women about her were intensely conscious of him, and she knew then that she had been at the same time lucky and tragically unlucky. It would be so easy for him ... a man of so much intelligence and a beauty like that of a fine animal.
Toward the end of the first winter, a day or two after she had made certain that she was to have a baby, she interrupted her shopping long enough to have lunch at the Ritz. She had a table, alone, in one corner of the big room and, having no one to talk with her, she fell to observing the types at the other tables and reflecting upon the vulgarity and self-conscious glitter which marked the patrons of such hotels the world over. So she was startled when she found that the personality of some one who entered the room at that moment had the power of distracting her.
Two women came in together and stood for a time surveying the room. The one (it was she who was disturbing) was tall, slender and handsome, dressed smartly in a black suit with a black fur. The other, plainly a Jewess (who understood perfectly the manipulation of head-waiters) was small, with a ferrety, good-natured face and an energetic, chattering manner. They took a table at a little distance so that Sabine was able to watch them.
In the beginning, as she realized that there was some reason for her having noticed the pair, she became aware of a sense of familiarity in the taller woman. Then, as she watched them, the reason became quite clear. It was the American girl ... the musician, in Paris and in the Ritz of all places, and no longer dowdy but handsomely dressed!
By long established precedent, Sabine made no move toward approaching the newcomer. It was her habit to avoid involving herself with too many people; such a course made life far too tiresome and complicated. She had known the girl well enough, but there was no point now in renewing the acquaintance; indeed, it seemed idiotic even to consider the idea. Vaguely, she reflected, it was a good idea to leave what was well enough alone.
But the old, insatiable curiosity had been aroused; she found herself puzzled as to the presence of Ellen ... (Tolliver, that was her name) ... in Paris. She had been poor. She had been, she told Sabine during those stark conversations in the house on Murray Hill, hindered by a hundred obstacles. Yet here she was, in Paris, dressed handsomely in clothes which the appraising eye of Sabine told her had come from one of the best establishments, probably Worth or Chanel. Sabine was curious too regarding the whereabouts of the husband ... the husband whom she had once mistaken very stupidly for the girl’s lover. And slowly, in the midst of the noisy room filled with a fantastic assortment of people, there rose in her memory a picture of that vulgar apartment the Babylon Arms, and a glimpse as they opened the door of the tiny top floor flat, of a mild little man in shirt sleeves. What had become of him?
She remembered too the confidences which she had exchanged with her mother-in-law in the days when the young musician seemed so near to upsetting their carefully laid plans. Mrs. Callendar had mentioned the mild little man, saying, “I’m certain the girl doesn’t care a fig for him. She’s tied to him by pity. That’s all. But we can be thankful for him. He stands between her and Richard.”