He satisfied himself, therefore, with looking extremely depressed, and watching which direction she took from the window. At the corner she stopped to buy two crimson roses and pinned them six inches under her chin; it was almost the last franc of the best bedstead money.
Monsieur Cartier had returned to Paris, and Margot sent her name up to his handsome rooms through the medium of a low-voiced, velvet-footed manservant—while she waited trembling at the door. She wrote on the card, “I want urgently to see you, Monsieur Jean’s friend, Margot Selba.”
The great Monsieur Cartier was a good-natured man; he was also curious.
All of Liane’s friends knew the name of Mademoiselle Selba almost as well as Liane’s enemies knew it, but Cartier was probably the only one of them who had no intention of dropping the young musician because of it.
Liane’s wrongs did not matter nearly so much to him as Jean’s touch on the piano—he considered, and he was an excellent authority, that Jean D’Ucelles had a very pretty touch and an idea or two behind it, while it had not occurred to him that Liane’s wrongs shared in either of these delicate qualities.
“Well, Mademoiselle,” he exclaimed, as Margot was announced, “of course I remember you—you had no need to announce yourself as a friend of Jean’s. It is a pleasure to see you. I read a charming account of one of your successes in the Journal the other day. You stand on your own feet now, and Jean, I hope, continues to remain at them?”
“Thank you, Monsieur,” replied Margot, with a neat little bow. “It is of Monsieur Jean that I came to speak to you.”
Cartier pulled forward one of his big leather armchairs in which Margot’s tiny figure was almost lost. She continued, however, to behave with as much dignity and assurance as if she were six feet tall and had been born in the Tuileries. She had never been in such a big room in her life, and her feet didn’t quite touch the floor—but no one would ever have supposed so to look at her.
“What’s the young scapegrace been doing?” asked Cartier genially. “If he has not been practising four hours a day he had better avoid meeting me, that’s all! A genius that doesn’t work is like a blood-horse with a broken wind—all very fine for the preliminary canter, but good for nothing after the first fence. You don’t come here with tales like that, I hope, Mademoiselle?”
“Oh, Monsieur,” exclaimed Margot, “first, before I tell you anything, promise me never to let him know that I have been here!”