“It’s nothing to Clémentine’s credit then that she’s a true friend and incapable of grabbing a man from another woman.”
“No, as long as she dresses like a futurist picture, and carries paper bags through the streets and dines with Ludovic at Voisin’s, she’s a horrid thorn in their sides.”
“Well, I’m sorry, because you know I don’t propose to stop going about with her.”
“Lord, no, why should you? You certainly deserve a bit of fun. Come to the Mouse Trap tomorrow night. We’ve a supper party after the Russian Ballet.”
But I knew what that meant, a troup of theatrical people, and every one drunk by morning, so I declined. I saw a good deal of Fan these days, but she had certain friends I couldn’t see. It didn’t amuse me to watch women get tipsy. Those Montmartre parties depressed me horribly. And I felt sure of Clémentine and her band on this point. It was just one of the admirable things about them that they could be so daringly gay and never verge on the rowdy. I had seen her administer a snub to a hiccoughing youth. She could be terrible when she was displeased, and whatever one said of her, for that matter whatever she herself felt, no one could get away from the fact that she was as proud a lady as any in France, and perfectly conscious of her privilege of caste. It was just this consciousness of her lineage, I imagined, that gave her such a sense of security. She knew that she could do anything she chose and be none the less privileged for it, and actually none the worse. If she touched pitch she knew it wouldn’t stick to her fingers. If she dipped into Bohemia, she did so knowing that she could never be said to belong there. There was always behind her a solid phalanx of relatives who would never disown her however much they disapproved. Always in her maddest escapades there were the towers of the family castle looming behind her. They cast an august shadow. She might dress like an artist’s model, never would she be taken for one. She was safe, perfectly safe and she knew it, and so did every one else.
But with me, as Aunt Clothilde pointed out, it was different.
“There’s nothing to prove what you are but the way you behave, my poor Jane. If Clem took it into her head to play at being a barmaid, the de Joignys and all the rest of them would wring their hands and call it a scandalous idiocy, but if you did the same thing they’d say, ‘Of course, it’s quite natural, she probably was a barmaid in her own country,’ and they wouldn’t wring their hands at all, they’d be mightily pleased.”
“So they think my associating with Ludovic is proof of a low mind?”
“Well, what do you find in that old bourgeois?”
“I find a gold mine.”