The little room which Margot shared with her mother always filled her with a sense of pride and protection. It held all the substantial remnants of Madame Selba’s country furniture. It contained an immense bureau, four looking-glasses, and three gilt clocks. None of the clocks would go, to be sure, but one on a handsome blue mat on the mantelpiece was surmounted by a dome of glass and flanked with terra cotta vases filled with artificial flowers. It was a magnificent affair and had been presented to Monsieur Selba on his having passed ten years in one particular firm. The other two clocks had been gifts to Madame Selba on her marriage, but the mere fact of the ceremony had appeared to startle them to such an extent that they had never given a tick since. Still they were undoubtedly extremely handsome, and there was room for one on the window-sill, and for the other upon a bracket above the washstand.
There was a crucifix and a prie-Dieu, given to Margot by her school friends at the Convent which in her luxurious youth she had attended for two unforgettable years, and she herself had bought the holy-water stoup which hung above it, upheld by two slightly irrelevant angels a little loose of wing, out of her first earnings. There was a linnet’s cage in the window, built in the shape of a palace, a present to Margot from a young ironmonger, a man in a social position so inferior to her own that she had had to discourage him; he had such nice curly hair, too! But she had prayed for him, and she always took peculiar care of the birdcage. The bird had died and she had not been able to afford another one. She looked at it with some impatience this morning: “Moi, je trouve que c’est déplacé,” she said to herself as she got up.
She cast an eye almost depreciatingly upon the heirloom of Madame Selba’s heart; this was a superb bedstead with brass knobs and a spring mattress, a bed which had struck the concierge’s wife with envy and was by no means the secret pride of Madame Selba’s existence.
“You can figure to yourself,” she used to say, “when you look at that bedstead, that there was a time in my life when I wanted for nothing.”
Margot had to keep the room very tidy, or else there would not have been much room to move about; the bureau and the bed between them having rather the air of two prize-fighters getting ready to be at each other’s throat and only prevented from carrying out this intention by a small strip of rag carpet and a cane chair. Mother and daughter could not by any possible means have dressed at the same time, but that hardly mattered, as Margot got up early to make her mother’s coffee and went to bed late because of the theatre.
You could see twenty-seven chimney-pots out of the window, and by sticking your neck at an uncomfortable angle you could catch a distant view of some green trees not half a mile away. It was, as Margot used to say, when she felt homesick for open fields and a wide sky, almost like the country. Madame Selba preferred a view of the street, but that she could get from the window of the living-room. There was a handsome public house opposite.
Madame Selba united two passions with equal ardour, a passion for Margot’s success, and a passion for brandy; that the two passions might occasionally conflict did not appear to occur to her; but she found it was more practical to work for the second and to dream of the first. In her way, Madame Selba was an idealist.
Margot loved her mother deeply, because she was her mother, and it never occurred to Margot not to love her, because she had always taken care of her, and because it was Margot’s nature to love.
“What I should do without Mother!” she had often said to herself; sometimes people said this for her, but with a different meaning.
Madame Selba was a stout woman, who ate heartily; she had never been able to work. She referred vaguely sometimes to internal troubles. Margot said, “Mother must be very careful not to overdo herself,” but no one except Margot ever felt it necessary to urge this caution upon her.