She was sitting in the door of her tent; her white dress and her white hat gleamed like a touch of snow upon the desert's face. Julia Redmond, on a rug at her feet, and in her khaki riding-habit the color of the sand, blended with the desert as though part of it. She sat up as she spoke.
"How divine! See!" She pointed to the stretches of the Sahara before her. On every side they spread away as far as the eye could reach, suave, mellow, black, undulating finally to small hillocks with corrugated sides, as a group of little sand-hills rose softly out of the sea-like plain. "Look, Thérèse!"
Slowly, from ocher and gold the color changed; a faint wave-like blush crept over the sands, which reddened, paled, faded, warmed again, took depth and grew intense like flame.
"The heart of a rose! N'est-ce pas, Thérèse?"
"I understand now what you mean," said madame. The comtesse was not a dreamer. Parisian to the tips of her fingers, elegant, fine, she had lived a conventional life. Thérèse had been taught to conceal her emotions. She had been taught that our feelings matter very little to any one but ourselves. She had been taught to go lightly, to avoid serious things. Her great-grandmother had gone lightly to the scaffold, exquisitely courteous till the last.
"I ask your pardon if I jostled you in the tumbrel," the old comtesse had said to her companion on the way to the guillotine. "The springs of the cart are poor"—and she went up smiling.
In the companionship of the American girl, Thérèse de la Maine had thrown off restraint. If the Marquise d'Esclignac had felt Julia's influence, Thérèse de la Maine, being near her own age, echoed Julia's very feeling.
Except for their dragoman and their servants, the two women were alone in the desert.
Smiling at Julia, Madame de la Maine said: "I haven't been so far from the Rue de la Paix in my life."
"How can you speak of the Rue de la Paix, Thérèse?"