Since their entrance into the room, except for the few moments when she had disappeared in answer to a request from Marguerite and had returned with the material for the fire, she had not left Marguerite’s side.
At present she sat clutching the older girl’s skirt as if she never wished her to escape.
To the group of American girls with whom she was at present making her home, Marguerite Arnot represented both a novelty and an enigma. They knew little of her history, as she showed no desire to talk of herself, save the few facts Miss Patricia had seen fit to tell Mrs. Burton, with the idea that she repeat them.
Marguerite and Miss Patricia Lord had met originally in a dressmaking establishment in Paris. At that time Miss Patricia was having the costume made which she had worn at her dinner party and which had been such a revelation to her family. Marguerite, when about to try on Miss Patricia’s dress, became unexpectedly ill and fainted during the process; otherwise Miss Patricia might never have taken the slightest notice of her. She took Marguerite to her home and there, finding that she lived alone and had no one to care for her, the eccentric but kindly spinster assumed the responsibility. Later, Marguerite had been invited to Versailles as a working member of Miss Lord’s present household.
There was no question of the French girl’s refinement, or of the undoubted talent she possessed. But of her character, the hopes, ambitions and ideas which compose a human personality, the Camp Fire girls understood but little.
She had explained that her mother had been an artist and her father a lawyer in a smaller city not far from Paris. Her father died when she was only a tiny girl, leaving his family penniless, and her mother had attempted to make their living with her art.
But either artists were too numerous in Paris, or else her mother had possessed insufficient ability, for after a year or more of hopeless struggle, she had devoted her attention to dressmaking.
In this she had been successful; for nearly as long as Marguerite Arnot could remember, she had been able to assist her mother with her work, sitting by her side as a tiny girl she had pulled out bastings and hemmed simple seams. In spite of their poverty she and her mother had been happy together.
Then the war had come and they had been among its many unheeded victims. With almost no work, with the added strain and sorrow, Madame Arnot’s health had given way, so that in the second year of the war Marguerite had been left to struggle on alone.
What she had suffered through loneliness and poverty in these last two years, probably she did not like to discuss.