She embroidered her thesis very gracefully, clothing the woman of the world in a diaphanous robe of pretty fancy, revealing a mind ever so little baffling, here material, there imaginative—a mind as contradictory as her face, with its chaste contours and its alluring eyes. Quixtus listened to her with amused interest. She represented a type with which he, accustomed to the less vivid womenfolk of the learned, was unfamiliar. Without leaving Huckaby, her girlhood’s friend, out in the cold, she made it delicately evident that, of the two, Quixtus was the more worthy of attention on account of his attainments and the more attractive in his personality. Quixtus, flattered, thought her a woman of great discernment.
“But you,” said he, at last. “Have you made your plunge—not that you need it—into the Fountain of Youth? Have you fed on the honeydew of the Bois de Boulogne and drunk the milk of Armenonville?”
“I only arrived last night,” she explained. “And I must remain more or less in quarantine, being an unprotected woman, till my friend Lady Louisa Mailing comes, or till my friends in Paris get to know I am here. But I always like a day or two of freedom before announcing myself—so that I can do the foolish things that Parisians would jeer at. I always go to the Louvre and look at the little laughing Faun and the Giaconda; and I always go down the Seine in a steamboat, and from the Madeleine to the Bastille on the top of an omnibus. Then I’m ready for my plunge.”
“I should have thought that bath of innocence was in itself the Fountain of Youth,” said Huckaby.
The least suspicion of a frown passed over Mrs. Fontaine’s candid brow. But she replied with a smile:
“On the contrary, my friend. That is a penitential dipping in the waters of the past.”
“Why penitential?” asked Quixtus.
“Isn’t it wholesome discipline to give oneself pain sometimes?” Her face grew wistful. “To re-visit scenes where one has been happy—and sharpen the knife of memory?”
“It is the instinct of the ascetic,” smiled Quixtus.
“I suppose I have a bit of it,” she replied, demurely. Then her face brightened. “I don’t wear a hair shirt—I’ve got to appear in an evening gown sometimes—but I find an odd little satisfaction in doing penance. If I were a Roman Catholic I would embarrass my confessor.”