“If you don’t mind we won’t talk about it. Other women’s marriages are nothing to me.”
She shrugged her shoulders and lit another cigarette, and for a time we were silent. I looked at her. She seemed to me terrible, hard as nails and more cynical than any one, and yet she was my friend. Nothing, I knew then as I watched her, nothing that she could say or do would alter that fact. She belonged to me. What she felt would always affect me. In some absurd way I was responsible for her. Our childhood and its meagre austere background, with all that she repudiated, held us together.
Presently she began again. “Now listen to me, Jane. Philibert may be a brute, but he’s done a lot for you. He has given you a very great position. You were rich but he knew how to make your money tell. There’s not a house in the world like yours. I don’t mean only the furniture. Your parties are beyond everything. You’re more recherchée than any woman in Paris. You can pick and choose from all the great people of the world, the men with brains. Lord! how you could amuse yourself if you wanted to. I only wish I had your chance. Do you think I’d let my husband’s infidelity spoil my life? I’d be no such fool. I might not like it, but I’d make up my mind to forget it. Well, here you are and you want to go back and crawl into that little hole in a prairie and stifle there.”
“Yes, I do.”
“But the people there—” she almost screamed.
“I don’t know about the people. They may not be what you call amusing, but they’re at any rate natural, common or garden human beings, and anyhow if there weren’t another soul there’s Aunt Patty; she’s the finest woman in the world, and I adore her.”
Fan looked at me in amazement.
“I’d die!” she gasped on a long, wailing breath. We were again silent, then, while the image of Aunt Patience took shape before us, gaunt, with her big bones showing under her limp, black clothes, worn, strong, knotted hands, crooked humourous face, weather-beaten like a peasant’s, straggling thin, grey hair. And suddenly I saw her as she appeared to Fan, a shabby old maid in frumpy clothes, talking with a nasal twang, saying things like Mark Twain, worshipping Huxley and Daniel Webster and Abraham Lincoln, a child woman of stern moral principles, unaware of the existence of such life as ours, displeased and angry at our doings, hurt deeply by our words and our laughter. I imagined her in Paris, stalking down the Rue de la Paix like a pilgrim from the Caucasus, a figure of grotesque grandeur disturbing the merry frivolous traffic, sublime, terrible spectre of stark simplicity, utterly out of her element in our world. And I was angry with Fan for evoking such an image. I turned away from it in distress, ashamed.
“You’ve already gone too far,” she said impishly. “You can’t get back. You’re spoiled for your Aunt Patience.”