AT breakfast on the following morning, the mulatto woman laid before Lily’s plate a cablegram. It read simply, “Jean has measles.”
Trunks were packed with desperate haste. The entire household was thrown into an uproar, all save old Julia Shane who continued to move about with the same unruffled calm, with the same acceptancy of whatever came to her. At midnight Lily boarded the express for the East. It was not until the middle of the week, when the drawing-room had been wrapped once more in cheesecloth and scented with camphor, that the Town learned of Lily’s sudden return to Paris. It was impossible, people decided, to calculate the whims of her existence.
Three months after her sudden departure, she sat one early spring afternoon on the terrace of her garden in the Rue Raynouard, when old Madame Gigon, in a bizarre gown of maroon poplin, with the fat and aging Fifi at her heels, brought her a letter from Julia Shane.
Tearing it open, Lily began to read,
“Of course the biggest bit of news is Ellen’s escapade. She has eloped with a completely commonplace young man named Clarence Murdock, a traveling salesman for an electrical company, who I believe was engaged to May Seton ... the Setons who own the corset factory east of the Harrison Mills. They have gone to New York to live and now, I suppose, Ellen will have her chance to go on with her music. Knowing Ellen, I am certain she does not love this absurd man. As for Hattie she is distraught and feels that Ellen has committed some terrible sin. Nothing I can say is able to alter her mind. To be sure, the fellow has nothing to commend him, but I’m willing to let Ellen work it out. She’s no fool. None of our family is that. Hattie thinks it was the gowns you gave Ellen which turned her head. But I suspect that Ellen saw this young drummer simply as a means of escape ... a way out of all her troubles. Of course the Town is in a buzz. Miss Abercrombie says nothing so unrespectable has happened in years. More power to Ellen ...!”
For a moment Lily put down the letter and sat thinking. In the last sentence there was a delicious echo of that wicked chuckle which had marked the departure of the discomfited Judge Weissman and Mrs. Julis Harrison from Cypress Hill ... the merest echo of triumph over another mark in the long score of the old against the new.
For a time Lily sat listening quietly to the distant sounds from the river ... the whistling of the steamer bound for St. Cloud, the faint clop-clop of hoofs in the Rue de Passy and the ugly chug-chug of one of the new motor wagons which were to be seen with growing frequency along the boulevards. Whatever she was thinking, her thoughts were interrupted suddenly by a little boy, very handsome and neat, in a sailor suit, who dragged behind him across the flagged terrace a stuffed toy bear. He climbed into her lap and began playing with the warm fur piece she had thrown over her shoulders.
“Mama,” he cried. “J’ai faim.... Je veux un biscuit!”
Lily gathered him into her arms, pressing his soft face against hers. “Bien, petit ... va chercher la bonne Madame Gigon.”
She seized him more closely and kissed him again and again with all the passion of a savage, miserly possession.