That you see ended well. She cried a little in my arms, and listened quietly as I explained that being good was quite another thing to the saintly life as she had understood it, and that this latter was not vouchsafed to children, and we arranged between us that it would be much more truly good, to take a great many baskets of toys to the little poor crippled children in the big hospitals than to jump out of bed when no one was looking, but I was not immeasurably reassured by my victory. With Jinny it was always a case of its being all right till the next time, and the next time was never slow in coming.
I take it that my own feeling for Jinny needs no explanation. I am a simple woman, and I was her mother; she was all that I had. But Philibert loving her so much was curious, don’t you think? It seemed so inconsistent of him! I don’t even now understand it. Perhaps the most obvious explanation is the real one. Perhaps it was just because she was so very attractive. Had she been ugly I believe that he would have disliked her. She was never ugly, she had never had an awkward age. At fourteen she had already that look of costliness, of something luxurious, sumptuous and precious that she has today. She was slender and fragile and smooth. At times she suggested a child Venus by Botticelli. Her mouth had the delicate drooping curve of some of his Madonnas, her hands were full and soft and dimpled with delicate tapering fingers. Sensuous idle hands, they were to her instruments of pleasure. Touching things conveyed to her some special delight; with her finger tips she enjoyed. I know for I have watched those hands for years, moving softly and deftly over lovely surfaces, and following the contours of flowers, of porcelain vases, but she never did anything practical with them. Even embroidery, she disliked. But jigsaw puzzles amused her—she and Philibert always had one somewhere spread out on a table. They spent hours together fitting in the innumerable tiny bits, their heads close together, excitedly comparing, fitting, exclaiming. Philibert liked the idea of his daughter’s distaste for doing anything useful. He encouraged her laziness and her absurd little air of languid hauteur. When she dropped a glove or handkerchief and waited for a servant to pick it up for her, he laughed.
Sometimes I tried to reason with him.
“You are spoiling her,” I said on more than one occasion, but he only shrugged his shoulders.
“Don’t you see, Philibert?” I would insist, “that it is bad for her to live in this atmosphere?”
“What atmosphere?”
“The atmosphere of this house, of Paris, of the world we live in.”
“Well, my dear, it is her house, her Paris, her world—she’s born to it, and belongs to it, so she may as well grow up in it. What would you have for her—something more like your own home over there, eh?—the place that turned you out, so admirably fitted for our European life—you want her to be as you were, is that it?”
“God forbid.”
“Well then—”