“Even when her seriousness bored us we were patient.”
“She can’t have loved us. We have never really known her then, after all.”
Clémentine jerked about. “I was always wanting her to take lovers. She wanted me to give up mine. Poor child—we were friends all the same.”
Felix’s falsetto came down to us in a shrill wail of exasperation.
“But we never attacked her religion. We left her alone. We were good to her.”
Clémentine nodded. “Yes, we were good.”
I remembered the day I had first brought Jane to them, clothed in her silks and sables, glittering with the garish light of her millions and her high cold social activities. I had brought her straight from the preposterous palace she had let Philibert build her to this deep dim nook where we laughed and scoffed at the world she lived in. I had been nervous then. I had been afraid they would find her impossible. But they had seen through the barbarous trappings, intelligent souls that they were. Hadn’t she realized how they had honoured her? Hadn’t she known what dependable people they were?
I heard Clémentine say it again. “We were good, but she thought we were wicked because we broke the ten commandments. She thought a lot of the ten commandments.”
“It was the puritan spinster looking at us over her shoulder all the time.”
And still they pondered and puzzled, bewildered, depressed, at a loss, annoyed by their incapacity to picture to themselves even so much as the place where she was, alone at that moment. “St. Mary’s Plains, Mohican County, Michigan” was the address she gave. What an address to expect any one to take seriously. If it had been a joke the mixture of images would perhaps have conveyed something to them, but as a serious geographic sign they could do nothing with it. It had the character of a new glazed billboard, of a big glaring advertisement for some parvenu’s patent. To think of Jane sitting down away off there in the middle of a desert under it was too much for them. But the very outrageousness of the enigma helped them.