“You are very beautiful,” the wise friend had also said. “But you do not care! I wish you women who long to be appeased cared for your good looks. A little vanity in a woman is a safe thing.” Yet she was glad to feel that her beauty existed, like the olive below the terrace, like the golden wave of hair in that picture in the Pitti; for it made the earth richer.
And Molly Parker’s last words came back to her. “I had rather you had run off with Erard,” Molly had remarked irritably. “At least they say a great passion is sometimes beyond control, but to slip off this way because you are bored!” Again, later,—“It would be better if you had some ‘vocation,’ as they call it.” She remembered that she had protested: “I have the vocation to be myself.” To-day she laughed at her pompous words. She needed no excuses; the earth smiled at her.
Erard, even, lay outside her soul with the others in that curious world she had forsaken. Sometime she should see him, but not yet. The days sped in peace. She made ready her villa where peace should be perpetuated. A Chicago acquaintance, catching sight of her standing radiant before the frescoes in the chill chapel of the Carmine, wrote home: “Our Mrs. Wilbur seems very happy with herself. You wouldn’t think she was as good as divorced. She hasn’t even a decent gloom.”
An end to this rapt mood came at last. Business necessitated a journey to Paris. Also a letter from the irrepressible Molly gave Mrs. Wilbur warning that she was not to be left to her own devices. “I am going over to join you. You’ve got to have some one to bully and look after you and pet you. I don’t approve of you and never shall, but I can’t let you be foolish all by yourself.... What are your plans—to wander about there with a maid from hotel to pension, or take an apartment and smoke and drink and try to make a man of yourself?” (For Miss Parker’s ideas about the modern woman were still crude.) “Plans!” Mrs. Wilbur exclaimed. That was the futile gabble she had tried to escape. One lived without plans. As she prepared to leave her city of delights she sighed; something warned her that the ecstasy of freedom would never flood so high again.
In the last calm, warm night she sat for hours on the terrace of her villa, fearing to leave her dearly bought peace. When she returned to the hotel, winding down between the walled orchards to the heated city, the Arno was singing under the arches of the Trinità. But the song sounded deep and solemn.
CHAPTER II
The pungent Latin odours emanating from the wine-shops along the boulevards stirred Mrs. Wilbur’s memory caressingly. This was Paris,—she dwelt on the word fondly. How eloquent it had been of joy!
She had left the noisome American quarter around the Opera House, where Paris turns a pandering face to the tourist, and selected a little hotel on the Quai, opposite the great palace. Her business with the solemn old lawyer sent by her elder brother was quickly transacted, and at the close she let fall a few pungent sentences to be carried to her family. “My husband is welcome to my fortune. I am glad he is good enough to use it. Fortunately I have enough beside. My family must endeavour to bear the disgrace—I will help them by keeping out of sight.” The lawyer talked divorce, but when he found her dumb, departed. “Pretty Walter,” as Mrs. Wilbur named her brother, was not so easily disposed of. He had come all the way from the great novelist Maxwell’s place in Surrey to look into her situation.
Walter Anthon had had a good time, all these years of his sister’s experimentation; he had kept his family informed of the growing circle of celebrities whose finger-tips he was permitted to touch. He might have made a booklet of the dainty notes he had received from Maxwell, the sage novelist, from Sandy Short, the supercilious literary maid of all work, and from Henderson, the celebrated author of closet dramas. Even Gaston had condescended to invite him for a week to his lodge in Scotland. The crowning glory of his career, however, had been when the famous African poet had met in his rooms the great Maxwell. He described the encounter epically to his sister. “Maxwell was moody and sunk in gloom. The African was fierce and taciturn. I trembled. But I plied Maxwell with champagne—he never drinks, you know, but this night at my entreaty he consented to empty five bottles. Then at midnight, the poet laid himself down before the fire on my bearskin, and such talk—” The saga here stayed in mystery.
After entertaining his sister with a list of his conquests in letters, he came to personal affairs. “Are you quite alone?” he asked, glancing at the orderly hotel salon with the little bedroom at one side.