“My dear Gerard,” said Helena, “you are dull, while the rest of the family are flurried. People talk about the day after the festival; my ‘Katzenjammers’ come ten hours before. I shall ring for Mademoiselle Papotier; she always amuses me.”
“Do,” said Gerard, surlily, glad of any postponement.
“That is charming. You could not have said that ‘do’ more naturally had we been husband and wife. Do I bore you? Then amuse yourself elsewhere. But don’t even expect me to ring the bell.” She jumped up lightly as she spoke and ran past him to the bell-pull.
“I don’t like Mademoiselle Papotier,” said Gerard. “She has taught you a number of things you needn’t have known. If you read books like that”—he pointed to Une Vie upon the table—“it’s her doing. I wish you wouldn’t, Helena. Men don’t like it.”
She came back to her seat: “Oh, but that is still more charming,” she said, “especially from your lips. You would have me restrict my reading so that I might the better enjoy your conversation. I won’t hear a word against my dear Papotier. She brightened my youth with eighteenth-century romances, and she cheers my old age by nineteenth-century novels. She is a dear.”
Undeniably, the heiress’s education had been a peculiar one. Her governess’s tissue-paper rosette of a soul had never given forth more natural odors than patchouly. The Baroness van Trossart could have told you how, when Helena was an eight-year-old little girl, she had come upon the child slapping her ball up and down in the court-yard, and occasionally muttering the same words over and over again.
“What on earth are you saying, my dear?” the Baroness had inquired.
And Helena had looked up with sparkling eyes: “And his beautiful head,” she had spouted, without stopping her ball-bumping, “went bounding three times across the marble, while repeating three times the sweet name of ‘Zaïre’! Isn’t it lovely? He was dead, you know; they had just cut it off.” And she had run away.
The Baroness had shaken her head. “It sounds like Scudéry,” she had said. But she was comfortable. She was not going to object to Mademoiselle Papotier.
“I shall read what I like,” repeated the heiress, provokingly. “And when I am married, I shall go to what plays I choose. I like impropriety on paper. Paper or boards. And so do you, Gerard, et plus que çà. You, of all people! I believe you are laughing at me.”