She had made him her ideal, and Mildred had revealed him to her as vicious, unprincipled. She could not forgive her mother for telling her those horrors, she, Mildred—seemed to forget whenever she was pleased. But Patrine had never forgotten. She would wake at night even now with the dry sobs shaking her.... To have been able to believe in that dead father as noble, chivalrous, good, would have been so sweet; she had shed big surreptitious tears in sympathy with the anguish of Jammes, who would have so loved to believe in the existence of Almighty God, and the dear little Jesus, the Blessed Virgin, and the holy Angels, because Faith is so restful, si paisible....
CHAPTER XV
THE BITE IN THE KISS
But von Herrnung was saying, as they moved with a straggling procession of similar pleasure-seekers, over smooth sanded pathways between beds of geranium and verbena and lobelia, ivy-leaved geranium and gaily coloured foliage-plants, bordered with little twinkling lamps:
"Shall I tell you what I have just heard as those people passed us? The tall man with the white moustache, and the chic little woman in the Spanish mantilla. She told her friend that we make a handsome couple. Perhaps that makes you a little angry? ... Shall I make you still more angry? Well then, listen? ... If we were really a couple you would not have that so-black hair...."
"Why not?" He had roused her curiosity. She put away the little damp, laced handkerchief. "Would your cruel usage of me have turned it white?"
"Not that, but you would have added the one touch that makes perfection. You are too sombre—too much like a night in October with all that cloudy blackness.... You would have bleached and dyed your hair—not yellow, nor yet orange—nor even flame.... The colour of beech-leaves in winter, as one sees them burning against a snow-bank. And—all the women would be crazy with jealousy—and all the men would be dying at your feet! For you would be Isis then—you would be the Sphinx-woman of whom La Forgue wrote and Colette has sung to us. You would be hellishly, divinely beautiful!"
"Hellish again." She gave her low, deep laugh, prolonging it a trifle stagily. "What do you bet me I don't—do what you said?"
"Bleach and dye...?"
"That's it." She nodded. "To the colour of—what was it? 'Beech-leaves in winter.' ..."