CHAPTER V
May 26th.
This morning a letter from Judith.
“Do not laugh at me,” she writes. “The road to Paris is paved with good intentions. I really could not help it. Delphine put her great arm round my would-be sequestered and meditative self and carried it off bodily, and here it is in the midst of lunches, picture-shows, dinners, suppers, theatres and dances; and if you laugh, you will make me humiliated when I confess that it is thoroughly enjoying itself.”
Laugh at her, dear woman? I am only too glad that she can fling her Winter Garment of Repentance into the Fires of Paris Springtide. She has little enough enjoyment in friendless London. Fill your heart with it, my dear, and lay up a store for use in the dull months to come. For my part, however, I am content to be beyond the reach of Delphine’s great arm. I must write to Judith. I shall have to explain Carlotta; but for that I think I shall wait until she becomes a little more explicable. In dealing with women it is well to employ discrimination. You are never quite sure whether they are not merely simple geese or the most complex of created beings. Perhaps they are such a curious admixture that you cannot tell at a given moment which side, the simple or the complex, you are touching. May not there be the deepest of all allegories in Eve standing midway between the innocent apple and the guileful serpent? I shall have to see more of Carlotta before I can safely explain her to Judith.
At any rate she is no longer attired like an odalisque of the Second Empire, and Mrs. McMurray has saved her from the lamentable errors of taste shown by the female mountebank of sixteenth century France. My excellent friend safely delivered up an exhausted and bewildered charge at half-past seven last evening, assuring me that her task had been easy, and that her anticipations of it being the day of her life had been fulfilled. It had been like dressing a doll, she explained, beaming.
An edifying pastime for an adult woman! I did not utter this sentiment, for she would rightly have styled me the most ungrateful of unhung wretches.
Carlotta, then, had followed her about like a perambulatory doll, upon which she had fitted all the finery she could lay her hands on. Apparently the atmosphere of the great shops had acted on Carlotta like an anaesthetic. She had moved in a sensuous dream of drapery, wherein the choice-impulse was paralysed. The only articles upon which, in an unclouded moment, she had set her heart—and that with a sudden passion of covetousness—were a pair of red, high-heeled shoes and a cheap red parasol.
“You have no idea what it means,” said Mrs. McMurray, “to buy everything that a woman needs.”