She laughed. “If you think my head’s turned, you’re mistaken. It’s a little head more solid than that.” Then, growing serious—“What I have seen and heard yonder, in a different sort of world, will enable me to form a truer judgment of things in Brantôme.”
Bigourdin came near the truth when he remarked later with a smile and a sigh:
“Here is our little girl transformed, in a twinkling, into a woman. She has acquired the art of hiding her troubles and of mocking at her tears. She will tell me henceforward only what it pleases her that I should know.”
Félise took up her duties cheerfully, performing them with the same thoroughness as before, but with a certain new and sedate authority. Her pretty assumption of dignified command had given place to calm assertion. Euphémie and Baptiste accustomed to girlish rebukes and rejoinders grumbled at the new phase. When Félise cut short the hitherto wonted argument by a: “Ma bonne Euphémie, the way it is to be done is the way I want it done,” and marched off like a duchess unperturbed, Euphémie shook her head and wondered whether she were still in the same situation. In her attitude towards Martin, she became more formal as a mistress and more superficial as friend. She had caught the trick of easy talk, which might have disconcerted him had the world been the same as it was before the advent of Lucilla. But the world had changed. He lived in Brantôme an automatic existence, his body there, his spirit far away. His mind dwelt little on any possible deepening or hardening in the character of Félise. So her altered attitude, though he could not help noticing it, caused him no disturbance. He thought casually: “Compared with the men she has met in the great world, I am but a person of mediocre interest.”
The New Year came in, heralded by snow and ice all over Europe. Beneath the steel-blue sky Brantôme looked pinched with cold. The hotel was almost empty, and Martin found it hard to occupy long hours of chilly idleness otherwise than by dreaming of Lucilla and palms and sunshine. Lucilla of course was always under the palms and the palms were in the sunshine; and he was talking to Lucilla, alone with her in the immensities of the desert. When he had dreamed long enough he shivered, for the Hôtel des Grottes still depended for warmth on wood fires and there was no central heating and the bath in the famous bathroom received hot water through a gas geyser. And then he wondered whether the time had not come for him to make his momentous journey to Paris.
“I’ve had a letter from Miss Merriton,” said Félise one day, “she asks for news of you and sends you her kind regards.”
Martin, who, in shirt-sleeves and apron, was laying tables in the salle-à-manger, flushed at his goddess’s message.
“It’s very good of her to remember me.”
“Oh, she remembers you right enough,” said Félise.
That meant that his goddess must have spoken of him, not only once but on various occasions. She had carried him so far in her thoughts as to be interested in his doings. Did her words imply a veiled query as to his journey into Egypt? A lover reads an infinity of significance in his mistress’s most casual utterance, but blandly fails to interpret the obvious tone in which the woman with whom he is not in love makes an acid remark.