“It’s intolerable, my dear fellow, that I can’t put you up permanently,” he went on, with his hard, light eyes wandering about the stately apartment and taking in the shabby luggage, the shy youth, the pitiful, small appearance which made Romain after all think that his wife had been right; “but as a matter of fact, you know, your good aunt is a little strict—young men will be young men, and in Paris—well! well! Paris isn’t a young man’s class of the Catechism, and the home is sacred! I assure you, my dear boy, I keep it so, and so must you, you know, when you marry; and meanwhile have rooms—have rooms—they’ve fascinating places in Paris to be had for almost nothing; we’ll look into all that to-morrow. And now we mustn’t keep your aunt waiting. To-morrow I’ll send you to a decent tailor; that suit won’t quite do for Paris, you know!”
Jean felt it wouldn’t. He had thought it very smart before, but he was broader and taller than his father, and the sleeves were too short, and the back too tight; besides, it looked different from his uncle’s.
Romain laughed genially, not cruelly, at Jean’s embarrassment; still Jean felt that he had disappointed this brilliant being; he wished he could think of something suitable to say, something dashing and witty and in the tone of his uncle’s talk; but he could think of nothing. He had always fancied before that conversation was a means of expressing what you wanted to say, a direct channel, as it were, for some very definite idea, but this hardly seemed Romain’s notion of the art. His words seemed to stand like a screen between Jean and his thoughts, and to take the place of some hard, light enamel covering a hidden substance. He ran on with his continual easy banter, quite as if he were Jean’s age, or as if Jean were his; and as if nothing in the world mattered, or could be worth a moment’s uneasiness or discomfort.
“We’ve very few people to-night,” he said. “I would have kept you quite to ourselves, you know, if I could, but one’s funny little social life here beats up like a tide; you cannot keep the waves off your particular piece of shore without being as ridiculous as King Canute was with the Atlantic, in your charming old England—which reminds me, my dear boy, I am sending you in to-night with an American girl; she can’t talk French, of course, or at least we hope against hope that she won’t try, and no one else can talk English, so you’ll have the very great honour! Make an impression upon her, I assure you it’s quite worth your while; she’s immensely rich and immensely handsome, and is going to be, I believe, quite the rage. I must confess to you American women don’t suit me, I prefer flesh and blood in a woman, not sawdust and cold steel. All the same, she has a ravishing figure, and I believe the figure of her income is still more magnificent. They may both be quite natural, for all I know to the contrary, but your dear aunt has made certain of the money!”
Jean was accustomed to a large house full of old things, but they were an entirely different type of old things from that of which his Uncle Romain had acquired possession. They were old because they were worn out and shabby, they were not old because they were precious and rare. The reception-rooms through which he passed with Romain to the drawing-room, where Madame D’Ucelles awaited them, were not larger than those he had left behind him, but they seemed so, because of their extraordinary brilliant emptiness. The first that they passed through had nothing in it but portraits, and a wonderful old bronze on a pedestal; this opened into another, with very little, very perfect Louis XVI. furniture. The chimney was in marble, with a delicate Sèvres china clock; in the corner was a grand piano covered with ancient jewel-encrusted embroidery. A screen of painted leather stood by the side of the fireplace, and one wall was entirely covered with shelves of oriental china. Madame D’Ucelles and a small group of friends stood by the fire. Jean had seen evening dress before in a provincial theatre, but it was not in the least like this. He hardly recognized his aunt in the bedizened, exposed, and highly coloured lady leaning over an old rose-pink sofa in an attitude that she tried to make as gracefully light as she could.
Madame la Comtesse D’Ucelles was extremely handicapped in the social race by a hopeless lack of the souplesse she adored.
One of Romain’s friends said of her: “Our poor Marie would so love to be thought indiscreet, but what can one say? She fights hard to produce the appearance of evil, but the upper lip and the stubborn bourgeois blood refuse to permit such laxity. She is hopelessly bonne femme, she cannot be anything wilder than a dear old cow. It is true that she can, if she likes, kick over the pail, but what she can’t do is to produce champagne instead of good rich country milk, and that, poor dear, is what she wants to do! She cannot go to anyone’s head, she is not intoxicating, she can only (look at our good Romain) help to create an embonpoint!”
Madame D’Ucelles’ upper lip might be against her, but she and her dressmaker had fought hard to defeat it! Of all the little group around her, she most looked to her nephew from the country, the extreme presentment of the ultra-fashionable life he had heard of and read about. Perhaps if Marie had known of this impression she might have allowed it to soften her manner a little; but as it was, she fixed her small, round, brown eyes on Jean, and despised him.
He was all the things she hated—poor, young, without even an incipient material value, and yet, even in his badly-fitting clothes and in the midst of a room full of strange sounds and light, and critical human beings, there was in him that ineradicable ease of race.
He was shy but he was not awkward; he was embarrassed but he was not as the men of her class would have been, clumsy. He did not, indeed, know quite what to say, but he lifted clear eyes to her face; and if there was anything that Madame D’Ucelles never forgave, it was dignity in an inferior. Jean had not felt his uncle’s light laughter at his appearance half as much as he felt the scornful glitter in his aunt’s eyes. Without moving her elbow from the sofa on which she leaned, she gave him her heavily bejewelled fingers to kiss.