I had said: "Here is my friend, my companion, my sister." On this evening, tender as dawn, she has left behind in me a great emotion which she does not understand.
VII
"A lady," the fat concierge told me. "Been here twice. Well, a sort of lady, a ... you understand. Her cheeks—her skirt—you can see her legs up to here.... Believe me or don't believe me, but she's twin pea to your Marie. If she comes back, what shall I tell her? I won't let that sort into my house! Eh? Kick her out?"
"Oh but, M. Etienne, I am at home to-day. Let her come up."
I closed my door blushing.
Through the banisters I recognized her. Actually Marie!
"Come in...."
She went in ahead of me to the dining-room—"my dining-room," she used to call it—and seated herself deliberately. Genuine timidity hides itself behind a mask of absurd audacity.
"Marie ... Marie ... is it possible?"
She was wearing a large red straw hat turned up at one side and weighted down on the other side by a nodding mass of huge black plumes, two tall elastic antennae, the sort worn by horses drawing hearses. Under the chalky enamel you couldn't see her freckles, but her eyes, her lovely eyes of purest aquamarine, with glints of indigo from her blackened lashes, still retained their dewy look of astonishment.