The Rescue

The Rescue

BY
Anne Douglas Sedgwick
AUTHOR OF “THE CONFOUNDING OF CAMELIA”
“THE DULL MISS ARCHINARD”

NEW YORK
The Century Co.
1902

TO
G. S. S.
AND
M. D. S.

[Chapter: I, ] [II, ] [III, ] [IV, ] [V, ] [VI, ] [VII, ] [VIII, ] [IX, ] [X, ] [XI, ] [XII, ] [XIII, ] [XIV, ] [XV, ] [XVI, ] [XVII, ] [XVIII, ] [XIX.]

T H E R E S C U E

I

It was in just such a room and in such surroundings that Damier had imagined seeing again his old friend, and his mother’s friend, Mrs. Mostyn. He always associated her with a sprightly conservatism. With a genial, yet detached, appreciation of modern taste, she would be placidly faithful to the taste of her girlhood. The house, he remembered, had been her mother’s, and its contents had probably remained as they were when her mother’s death put her in possession of it. He remembered Mrs. Mostyn’s caps, her cameos, her rings, her bracelet with the plaited hair in it, her jests, too, and her gaieties—all with a perfume of potpourri, with a niceness and exactitude of simile that had not attempted to keep pace with the complexities, the allusiveness and elusiveness, of modern humor.

Mrs. Mostyn had lived for many years in this small country house; she had entered it as a childless widow after a life of some color and movement, her husband having been a promising diplomat, whose death in early middle age had cut short a career that had not yet found an opportunity of rising from promise to any large achievement. After his death Mrs. Mostyn devoted herself to books, to her garden, her poor people, and her friends. Her house was not adapted to a large hospitality, but one of these friends was usually with her. Damier, however, was only paying a call. He had never visited Mrs. Mostyn; she had visited his mother in London, and since his mother had died he had been little in England. Now he was staying with the Halbournes, eight miles away.

The atmosphere of the room, as he waited, the stillness of the warm, fragrant garden outside, combined to make a half-tender, half-melancholy mood, in which an impression, quickly felt, is long remembered. Such an impression awaited him in the old photograph-album. It had been natural to see there his mother’s gentle, thoughtful face—first of a round-cheeked girl, looking like a Thackeray heroine, and, later, the face he knew so well, fatigued, sad, yet smiling under gray hair; natural to see his father, with dreaming eyes and the fine head of the thinker; to see aunts and uncles, his dead sister, and himself: but it was with the half-painful, half-joyous shock of something wholly unfamiliar, wholly arresting, strongly significant, that he came upon the photograph of an unknown lady. It was a faded carte-de-visite, and the small lettering on the cardboard edge spoke of Paris and of some bygone photographer. The lady was portrayed in a conventional pose and without modern accessories, leaning one arm in its sleeve of flowing silk on the back of a high chair, a hand hanging, half hidden, against the folds of her silken skirt. She was dressed after the fashion of the late sixties, in that of the Second Empire; yet, though her dress spoke of France, as the photograph had done, and spoke charmingly, her face was not that of a French-woman. One’s first impression—not too superficial, either—was of a finished little mondaine; but finished, poised, serene as she was, she could not be more than twenty—indeed, as Damier reflected, youth at that time was not a lengthy epoch, as in ours. She was slender, the leaning bust and arm rounded, the hand long. Her face was heart-shaped; the dark hair, parted over the forehead and drawn up fully from the brows, emphasized the width across the eyes, the narrowness of the face below; the lips were firm and delicate. Of her eyes one saw chiefly the gaze and the darkness under a sweep of straight eyebrow. And Damier had passed at once through these surface impressions to an essential one: her head was the most enchanting he had ever seen, and her eyes, as they looked at him, had a message for him. Man of the modern world as he was, he stood looking back at this dim, enchanting face; stood trying to interpret its message over the chasm made by more than two decades; stood wondering what she meant to him. He was wrapped in this sensation—of a spell woven about him, of an outstretching from the past, of something mysterious and urgent—when Mrs. Mostyn came in.

II

“Ah, yes. Is she not charming?”

“She has charmed me. She is wonderful.”

“Her story was certainly rather wonderful. And she always charmed me, too, though I knew her only slightly, and saw her for only a short time. I met her in Paris when I was there with my husband. She was a Miss Chanfrey—Clara Chanfrey, a younger branch of the Bectons, you know. Clara had come out in London the year before. Lady Chanfrey, an ambitious woman, had, I fancy, determined on a brilliant match for her, and it seemed about to be realized, for Lord Pemleigh followed them to Paris, where Clara’s beauty made a furor—she was thought lovelier than the Empress. As I remember her there was really no comparison; she was far lovelier. I can see her now: one night at the Tuileries—she wore a white gauze dress and lilies-of-the-valley in her hair; and at the opera, Lord Pemleigh in the box, a hard, impassive man, but he was, report said, desperately enamoured; and, again, riding in the Bois in the flowing habit of the time. There was an air of serious blitheness about her; yet under the blitheness I felt always an eagerness, a waiting. She always seemed to be waiting, and to smile and talk pour passer le temps—to make the something that was coming come more quickly. Poor child! it came.”

“She married Lord Pemleigh?” Damier asked, as Mrs. Mostyn paused, her eyes vague with memories.

“No; don’t you remember? He married little Ethel Dunstan—but only after years had passed. No; she did an extraordinary thing—a dreadful thing. She eloped—ran away with a French artist, a man of no family, no fortune. He was introduced to the Chanfreys in Paris, and painted Clara’s portrait. Very clever it was thought, rather in the style of Manet; a full-length portrait—I saw it—of Clara in a white lawn dress with a green ribbon around her waist and a green ribbon in her black hair, and at her throat an emerald locket. Perhaps his very difference charmed her, and the distance that separated his world from hers made her unable to see him clearly; he was, too, extremely handsome. No explanations are needed of why he fell in love; the wealth and the position he hoped through her to attain were sufficient reasons, to say nothing of her beauty. At all events, Clara proudly avowed that they loved each other. One can only imagine the storm. The Chanfreys took her back to England; he followed them; and she ran away with him and married him. Her family never forgave her. Her father and mother died without ever seeing her again, and she refused the small allowance they offered her. Since those days I have heard only vaguely of her, and heard only unhappy things. The man, Jules Vicaud, was a talented brute. With her all had been glamour, charm, romance, the sense of generous trust; with him calculation and selfishness. He treated her abominably when he found that he had gained nothing with her; and he was idle, extravagant, dissipated. They became terribly poor. It was a sordid, a horrible story;—a violet dragged in the mud.”

Damier had listened in silence; now, as Mrs. Mostyn handed him back the album, and as, once more, the steady gaze met his, “I cannot associate her with the gutter,” he said, “nor can I understand this violet stooping to it. I should have imagined her too fastidious, too intelligent, and, if you will, too conventional to be for one moment dazzled by a shoddy bohemian.”

“Oh,” sighed Mrs. Mostyn, “has delicacy ever been a certificate of safety? She was fastidious, she was intelligent, she was conventional; but she was also idealistic, impulsive, ignorant—far more ignorant than a modern girl would be. Her knowledge of any other world than her own was so vague that the very carefulness of her breeding made her unconscious of its lack in others; differences she would have thought significant only of his greatness and her own littleness. She dazzled herself more than he dazzled her, perhaps. And he was, then at least, more than the shoddy bohemian. He had grace, power,—I well remember him,—an apparent indifference to the more petty standards and tests of her world that no doubt seemed to her a splendid, courageous unworldliness. And then he came at a moment of rebellion, pain, and perplexity, as a contrast to the formality, the charmlessness of her English suitor. She did not love Lord Pemleigh; her resistance to the match had already embittered her relations with her mother—Lady Chanfrey was a high-spirited, clever, cynical woman. And then—and then—she fell in love with Jules Vicaud; that is, after all, the only final explanation of these stories.”

“And she ceased to love him?” He seemed now to interpret the gaze more fully. Did it not foresee? Did it not entreat—though so proudly?

“Ah, I don’t know. All I know is that she stuck to him, and that she was miserable. Poor, poor child!” Mrs. Mostyn repeated.

“And is she dead?” he asked after a little pause in which it seemed to him that they had thrown flowers on a long-forgotten grave.

Mrs. Mostyn looked out of the window at the summer sky and sunny garden, the effort of difficult recollection on her face.

“I really don’t know—I really can’t remember. So soon afterward my husband died; Lady Chanfrey died; I came here to live. I heard from time to time of her misfortunes—of her death I don’t think I heard; but for years now I have heard nothing. How many years ago is it? This is ‘95, and that was—oh, it must have been nearly twenty-eight years ago.”

“So that she would be now?”

“She would be forty-seven now. If she is alive the story of her life is over.”

“I wonder if it is. I wonder if she is alive.”

The gaze of the photograph, with all its calm, grew more profound, more significant.

“Could you find out?” he asked presently.

Mrs. Mostyn broke into a laugh that, with its cheery common sense, like a gay cockcrow announcing dawn, seemed to dispel the hallucinations of night, recall the reality of the present, and set them both firmly in their own epoch.

“My dear Eustace! What a dabbler in impressions you are! I won’t say dabbler—seeker-after.”

“Not after impressions,” said Damier, smiling a little sadly.

“And have you not found anything?” she asked.

“No; I don’t think I have.”

“Neither a religion, nor a work, nor a woman!” smiled Mrs. Mostyn. “You have always reminded me, Eustace, of that introspective Swiss gentleman of the journal. You are always seeking something to which you can give yourself unreservedly. But my sad little Clara, even if she would have meant something to you, came too early. She missed you by—how many years?—fifteen at least, Eustace; you were hardly more than a baby when that photograph was taken. But she may have had a daughter,—the daughter of the bohemian and the mondaine,—and you might find there an adventure of the heart.”

“Ah, I don’t care about a daughter—or about an adventure.”

Mrs. Mostyn glanced at his absorbed, delicate face with a smile baffled and quizzical. She controlled, however, any humorous queries, and said presently:

“Yes, I might try to find out. I might write to Mrs. Gaston; she knows Sir Molyneux Chanfrey, Clara’s brother,—a man I never liked,—and she could ask him.”

“Pray do.”

“But I don’t fancy Sir Molyneux is very easy to approach on the subject. He and his sister were never sympathetic.”

“I wish you would find out,” Damier repeated.

“I will, Eustace, and give you a letter of introduction to her if I ever find her,” smiled Mrs. Mostyn.

III

He was amused now, amused and yet amazed, by the extraordinary impression that the old photograph had made upon him. More than once he had drawn back on the verge of a great passion,—drawn back he could hardly have said why,—feeling that the woman, or he himself, lacked something of the qualities that could make them lastingly need each other. And now it really seemed to him that he needed, and would need lastingly, this woman of thirty years ago; and surely she needed him. She called to him, and he answered. He understood her; he loved her.

It was whimsical, absurd, pathetic. He could smile over it, yet under the smile some deeper self seemed to smile another smile—the smile of a mystery speaking at last in words that he could not understand, but in a voice that he could hear.

Mrs. Mostyn had yielded the photograph to his determined claim,—laughing at his impudence,—and he kept it always beside him in the weeks that followed his departure from ——shire. During those weeks, that lengthened into months, no news came, and the eagerness of his feeling died away. The feeling was still there, but it was like an awakened and living memory of an old, dead love. He thought of her as dead; it was best so, for he could imagine with repulsion the degradation that a harried life in the slimier walks of bohemia might have wrought in her had she lived. The sense of half-humorous, half-tragic pathos remained with him. He smiled at the photograph every day. It represented just what a memory, deep and still, would have represented. It said to him, “We have found each other. Now we will never part.” And absurdly, deliciously, he felt—with an instinct that fluttered wings high above any net of reason, singing, almost invisible—that what he had missed was waiting for him somewhere.

ONE day in late autumn, when he had returned to London, something happened which changed the character of this unsubstantial romance. He met at his club another old friend, a contemporary of Mrs. Mostyn’s. Sir Henry Quarle was a writer of pleasant reminiscences, a garrulous and companionable man about town, who had kept careful pace with the times, who, indeed, flattered himself that he usually kept a step or two ahead of them: he was prophetic as well as reminiscent; had firm opinions and facile appreciations.

He and Damier spoke of Mrs. Mostyn,—Sir Henry, too, had seen her recently,—of Paris, and of her connection with it. “And by the way,” said Sir Henry, “she told me that you were tremendously interested in what she told you about Madame Vicaud—Clara Chanfrey that was. Now I know a good deal about that unhappy history, and can, indeed, carry it on to a further chapter; the first did interest you?”

“Tremendously,” Damier assented, feeling, with a beating heart, that daylight was about to flood his mystic temple. “Is she alive?” he added.

“That I don’t know. But I saw the second chapter at close quarters. I went to Vicaud’s studio one day. They had been married only a few years; she was a mere girl even then. I never saw such wretchedness.”

“In what way?” Damier’s heart now beat with a strange self-reproach.

“Oh—not describable. It was the evident hiding of misery that one felt most, the controlled fear in her face. She was lovelier than ever, but white, wasted, her delicate hands worn with work. The place was already poverty-stricken, but clean—grimly clean; I have no doubt she scrubbed the floor herself. Four or five artists were there—clever, well-known men, but not of the best type: the kind of men who wrote brutally realistic feuilletons for papers of the baser order, who painted pictures pour épater le bourgeois; grossly materialistic, cynically skeptical of all that was not so. One felt that, though utterly alien to it by taste, she could have adapted herself, in a sense, to the best bohemianism. She was broadly intelligent; she would have recognized all that was fine, vital, inspiring in it, all that it implies of antagonism to the conformist, the bourgeois attitude. But the bohemianism of her husband and his comrades could only turn her to ice. It was strange to see her fear, and yet her strength, in these surroundings. They saw it, too; her chill gentleness, her inflexible face, cowed them, made them silly rather than vicious. Only, at that time, she had not cowed her husband; at all events, he seemed to take a pleasure in showing his mastery over her, his indifference to her attitude. He was a genius, with the face of a poet and the soul of a satyr. She had charmed him by her unusualness; he had determined to have her, to snatch her, the fine, delicate creature, from another world, as it were, and to make her part of his experience of life in very much the same sense as he would have tried a new kind of sin for the sake of its novelty. Then, too, he hoped, of course, for advancement, pecuniary and social; the disappointment of that hope must have roused the fiend in him. Of course he loved her—if one can turn the word to such base uses. What man would not have loved her? He loved her as he might have loved one of his mistresses; and I remember that on that day he dared—as perhaps he would not have dared had they been alone—to go to her before us all, fondle her cheek, and, putting his arm around her, kiss her. We all, I think, felt the ugly bravado of it, and I know that I never detested a man as I detested him at that moment. She sat motionless, expressionless. Only her eyes showed the terror of her helplessness, her despair.”

“Just heavens!” Damier exclaimed, after a silence filled for him with a bewildering aching and despair. “Why did she not leave him?”

“Well,” said Sir Henry, looking at the tip of his cigar, and crossing his knees for the greater comfort of impersonal reflection, “there was the child—they had a child, a girl; I never saw it; and there was her pride—she had been cast off by all her people; and there was his need of her. A few years after their marriage Vicaud took to absinthe, and drank himself half mad from time to time. Her conceptions of the duties of marriage, the sacredness of its bond, were, I am sure, very high; duty, pity, a hopeless loyalty, kept her to him, no doubt. What she went through no one, I suppose, can imagine.

“I saw her once again; I was in Paris for a few days—it must have been more than ten years after that first meeting. I met her leading her husband in an allée in the Bois. He was a wreck then, his talent gone, his noble face a pallid, bloated mask. He leaned on her arm, draped in his defiant black cloak. I sha’n’t forget them as they walked under the October trees. She was changed, immensely changed. Her stately head was still beautiful, but with a beauty stony, frozen, as it were. There was no longer any touch of fear or softness. When she saw me she smiled with all her own gracious courtesy—but graciousness a little exaggerated; she had become, I saw, by long opposition to the life about her, almost too ineffably the lady. She had to keep, consciously, the perfume of life.

“I walked on with them, and, perhaps as a result of my evident wish to see more of her, she asked me to go back to dinner with them. I did, realizing when I got to their apartment what it must have cost her to ask me, and what the pride must be that could do it and seem indifferent in the midst of that tawdry, poverty-stricken, vicious existence. Up flights of soiled and shabby stairs, in a mean house, to a miserable room—its bareness the best thing that could be said of it—at the top of the house, overlooking a squalid quarter of Paris. There was a harp in one corner, and Madame Vicaud, in answer to my inquiry about her music, said that she gave lessons. The young daughter was at school in England, and Vicaud’s old mother lived with them, a spiteful, suspicious-looking bourgeoise with a handsome, flinty eye. Clara Vicaud gave her all the quiet deference that she would have given her had she been her equal. She had evidently forced from the old woman—forced by no effort, but by the mere compulsion of her own unflinching courtesy—a sullen respect. Her husband looked at her, spoke to her, with an odd mingling of resentment and dependence. He would say constantly, ‘Que dis-tu, Claire?' But he talked, too, with the evident intention of putting her to shame before her English guest,—seeing how she bore it,—talked of gallant adventures, of the charms of various females of his acquaintance. She sat pale, mild, and cold. It was like seeing mud thrown at a statue of the Madonna.

“When she and I talked together after the supper—one could hardly call the meal a dinner—she did not make an apologetic reference to the ribaldry we had listened to. She did not refer, either, to any of the friends she no longer knew. We spoke chiefly of her daughter, and of books. The daughter was evidently the one ray of light in her existence; she told me about her progress at school, her cleverness, her beauty. And next to her daughter, reading and music had been her great resources. I was surprised at her scholarship, at her familiarity with German philosophy, English poetry, Russian fiction, French and English literary and social criticism; indeed, on the subjects of social problems, of human suffering and the various remedies, economic and ethical, suggested for it, her knowledge was far deeper than my own. But in all our talk there was not a note of the personal, the confidential, the regretful; she might have been sitting in an environment absolutely her own. I never saw her again after that evening. When I was in Paris some years later I went to the house, and heard that Monsieur Vicaud and his mother had both died there, and that Madame Vicaud, after nursing them through their last illnesses, had gone. I have often wondered what became of her.”

Damier asked no further questions, and the talk drifted away from the subject of Madame Vicaud and her misfortunes. But that evening he wrote to Mrs. Mostyn, and asked her if she had not yet obtained for him some news of his lady of the photograph. The photograph had for him that night a new look; it still said, “I need you,” but “I need you now. Help me.” He was convinced that she lived.

Mrs. Mostyn’s reply came in a day, and inclosed a letter of introduction to Madame Vicaud, Rue B——, Paris. “Sir Molyneux knew nothing of his sister’s whereabouts,” Mrs. Mostyn wrote, “and it was from another source that I found out that Clara still lives, and at the inclosed address. Do find her, my Don Quixote, and I must make her come and visit me.”

The inclosed letter asked Madame Vicaud to recall an old friend, and to welcome Mr. Damier for her sake and his own. She had only recently had news of Madame Vicaud, and so was able, happily, to aid Mr. Damier in his great wish to make her acquaintance. She hoped, also, that she might see Madame Vicaud in England soon; would she not pay her a visit—a long one? It was a long letter, graceful, cordial, affectionate, a rope of flowers thrown to Damier for his guidance into the labyrinth.

IV

DEAR MR. DAMIER: I shall be very glad to see you to-morrow afternoon at four. I well remember Mrs. Mostyn; to hear of her from a friend of hers will be a double pleasure.

Yours sincerely,
CLARA VICAUD.

It was like the evocation of a ghost to see this reality, emerged suddenly out of the dream-world where, for so long, he had thought of her, the young girl leaning on the chair-back in her flowing dress of silk. She was alive, and he was to see her that afternoon. Damier felt a chill overtake his eagerness. Was he not about to shatter a charming experience—one of the sweetest, most tender, most dearly absurd of his life? Would he not find in the real, middle-aged Clara Vicaud a hard, uninteresting woman? He had a vision of stoutly corseted robustness in jetted black cashmere; of a curve of heavy throat under the chin; of cold eyes looking with wonder, with suspicion even, upon his romantic quest. He could almost have felt it in him to draw back at the eleventh hour were he not ashamed to face in himself such cowardice. He took out the photograph and looked at it, and the eyes of Clara Chanfrey seemed to smile at him with something of tender irony. “Do not be afraid of me; I will never disappoint you,” they said. After all, what could the mere passage of years mean to such a face as that? What could the bitter experiences of a sorrowful life hold in them to tarnish ever the spirit that looked from it? The reluctance was only superficial, a ripple of reaction upon the deep tide of his impulse.

At four that afternoon he drove to a long, narrow street near the Boulevard St. Germain—a street of large, bleak houses showing a sort of dismantled stateliness. At one of the largest, stateliest, bleakest of these the fiacre stopped, and Damier, after asking the way of a grimly respectable concierge with a small knitted shawl of black wool folded tightly about her shoulders, mounted a wide, uncarpeted stone staircase to the highest floor, feeling, as he stood outside the door, that, despite the long ascent, the thick beating of his heart was due more to emotional than to physical causes.

He rang, and as he stood waiting he heard suddenly within a woman’s voice singing. The voice was beautiful, and the song was Schumann’s “Im wunderschönen Monat Mai.” Its pathos, its simplicity, its tenderness, mingled with Damier’s almost tremulous mood, and pierced his very soul. It was like an awakening in Paradise; there was the remembered sadness of a long, long past; the strange, melancholy rapture of something dawning, something unknown and wonderful. Could any music more fitly usher in the coming meeting?

A middle-aged servant came to the door, conventual in the demure quiet of her dress and demeanor, and ushered Damier into a bare and spacious room where the light from scantily curtained windows shone broadly across the polished floor. A woman rose and came forward from the piano. Damier’s first impression, after the breathless moment in which he saw that it was not she, was one of dazzling beauty.

“I am Mademoiselle Vicaud—Claire Vicaud,” this young woman said, “and you are Mr. Damier. My mother is expecting you; she will be here directly.”

Perhaps he felt, as she smiled gravely upon him, it was the power in her face, rather than its beauty, that had dazzled him. Already he discovered something almost repellent in its enchantment. Her eyes were dark, with a still, an impenetrable darkness; a small mole emphasized the scarlet curve of her upper lip; the lines of cheek and brow were wonderfully beautiful. It was, indefinably, in the soft spreading of the nostrils, in the deeply sunk corners of the mouth, that one felt a plebeian touch. There was nothing, however, of this quality in the carriage of her head, with its heavy tiara of dark-red hair, nor in the dignity and grace of her figure; and nothing in her, except some vague suggestion in this grace and dignity, reminded him of the photograph; and he was at once deeply glad of this, glad that Mademoiselle Vicaud resembled her father—he felt sure she did—and not her mother.

She seated herself, indicating to him a chair near her, and observed him with the same grave smile, and in an unembarrassed silence, while he spoke of his pleasure at being in Paris, at finding them there. Damier himself was not unembarrassed; found it difficult to talk trivialities to this Hebe while thrilling with expectation; and Mademoiselle Vicaud, unable otherwise to interpret it, may well have seen in her own radiant apparition the cause of his slight disturbance.

“But you are not old,” she said to him.

“Did you expect that?” he inquired.

“Then you are not a friend of Mamma’s—a friend of her youth, I mean? I don’t think that she was quite sure who you were.”

“It is only through an old friend of hers that—I hope to become another,” Damier finished, smiling.

“Well, pour commencer, you may be our young friend—we have time, you and I, before we need think of being old ones. I get tired of old things, myself.”

“Even of old friends?” Damier asked, amused at her air of placid familiarity.

“Ah, that depends.”

He observed that Mademoiselle Vicaud, though speaking English with fluent ease, had in her voice and manner some most un-English qualities. Her voice was soft, deep, and a little guttural. She had a way, he noticed later on, of saying “Ah” when one talked to her, a placid little ejaculation that was curiously characteristic and curiously foreign.

But at the moment further observations were arrested. The door opened, and rising, as a swift footfall entered the room, Damier found himself face to face with his lady of the photograph.

He blushed. His emotion showed itself very evidently on his handsome, sensitive face, so evidently that the strangeness of the meeting made itself felt as a palpable atmosphere, and made conventional greetings an effort and something of an absurdity. Madame Vicaud, however, dared the absurdity, and so successfully that the formal sweetness of her smile, the vague geniality of her voice, as she said right things to him, seemed effortless. Damier, through all the tumult of his hurrying impressions, comparisons, wonders, yet found time to feel that she was a woman who could make many efforts and seem to make none. Her manner slid past the stress of the moment; her wonder, if she felt any, was not visible. All that she showed to her sudden visitor, introducing himself through a past that must have been long dead to her, was the smile, the geniality, vague and formal, of the woman of the world.

By contrast to this atmosphere of rule and reticence, the few words he had exchanged with the daughter seemed suddenly intimate—seemed to make a bond where the mother’s made a barrier. But above all barriers, all reticences, was the one fact—the wonderful fact—that she was she, changed so much, yet so much the same that the change was only a deepening, a subtilizing of her charm.

“Yes, I remember Mrs. Mostyn so well,” said Madame Vicaud, “and it is many years ago now. She must be old. Does she look old? Is she well? Will she come to Paris one day, do you think? Ah, as for my going to England to see her, that is a great temptation, a sufficient one were the possibility only as great. My daughter has been much in England; she really, now, knows it better than I do.”

Mademoiselle Vicaud did not meet her mother’s glance as it rested upon her; her eyes were fixed, with their dark placidity, upon Damier, as she sat sidewise in her chair, her hands—they were large, white, beautifully formed—loosely interlaced on the chair-back.

“Yes; I know England well,” she said—“educational England. I went to school there. I associate England with all that is formative and improving; I have been run through the mold so many times.”

“Run through?” Damier asked, smiling. “Have you never taken the form, then?” He was not interested in Mademoiselle Vicaud, although he felt intimate with her; but her mother’s glance brought her between them, placed her there; one was forced to look at her and to talk to her.

“Do you think I have?” Mademoiselle Vicaud asked, with her smile, that was not gay, a slumberous, indulgent smile. “I hope not,” she added, “physically, at least. I don’t like your English outline, as far as that is concerned.” Damier could but observe that hers was not English. She was supple, curved—slender, yet robust; one saw her soft breathing; her waist bent with a lovely flexibility. But the contemplation of these facts, to which she seemed, with the indifference of perfect assurance, to draw his attention, emphasized that sense of intimacy in a way that rather irritated him; Mademoiselle Vicaud, her outline and her exquisite gowning of it, slightly jarred upon him. He hardly knew how to word his appreciation of her difference, and after saying that he was glad she had escaped the more unbecoming influences of his country, added: “I hope that there were some things you cared to adopt.”

“They adopted me. I was quite passive, quite fluid,” said Mademoiselle Vicaud.

Her mother, while they interchanged these slight pleasantries, continued to look at her daughter.

“You rather exaggerate, do you not, Claire, the coercive nature of your English experience?” she said. “It was not all school; there was play, too.”

“Play like the kindergarten kind, with a meaning in it. My mother has always been anxious for me to take the right impressions,” said Mademoiselle Vicaud, her eyes still on Damier; “she has always chosen them for me.”

There was a momentary silence after this—a silence that might, Damier fancied, have held something of irritation for the mother, though none showed itself in the calm intelligence of her glance as it rested on her daughter.

Looking from her before the pause could become significant of anything like argument or antagonism, she asked Damier for how long he expected to remain in Paris, and the talk floated easily into cheerful and familiar channels—concerts, the play, books, and pictures.

She was so much more like the photograph than he had expected, and yet so different! The figure was the same, almost girlish, more girlish, really, than Mademoiselle Claire’s, though the fall in the line of her shoulders, the erect poise with which she sat, recalled a girlishness of another epoch, another tradition.

There was that in the folds of her long silk skirt,—a worn, shining silk, yet in its antiquity replete with elegance,—in the position of her narrow foot pointing from beneath its folds, in the way she lightly folded her arms while she talked to him, that suggested deportment, a manner trained, and as much a part of her as putting on her shoes was. She was very mannered and very unaffected; the manner was like the graceful garment of her perfect ease and naturalness—their protection, perhaps, and their ornament. As for her face, Damier, looking at it while they talked, felt its enchantment growing on him, like the gradual tuning of exquisite instruments preparing him for perfect music. Still, the face of the photograph, so unchanged that it was startling to feel how much older it was. The abundant hair was dressed in the same fashion, but its black was now of an odd grayness that made one just aware that it was no longer black. The heart-shaped oval was emphasized; the cheeks were thin, the chin sharply delicate, the lips compressed when she did not smile—but she frequently smiled—into a line of endurance, of a patience almost bitter. There were tones of pale mauve in the faint roses of her lips and cheeks, but Damier felt that this charming tint must always have been theirs—went with the snow and ebony of her type. Although her face was little lined,—emotion with her had been repressed, not demonstrated,—it had a look more aging than lines—a look of bleakness, of a cold impassivity. The texture of her skin was like a white rose-petal just fading. And in this faded whiteness her dark eyes gazed, more stern, more tragic than in youth. There was in them, and in the straight line of her black brows above them, a somberness and almost a menace. Damier wondered over the strange contrast to her frequent smile. He saw that where Mademoiselle Vicaud was still and grave her mother was light and gay, but the gaiety and lightness—he traced the impression further—were part of the manner, the protecting, ornamental manner; were something that had once been real, and were now put on, like her shoes, again. The daughter showed herself, or seemed to show herself, imperturbably: the mother was hidden, masked; her eyes, with their contrasting smile, made him think of Tragedy glancing among garlands of roses.

Before he went, that day, Damier told Madame Vicaud that his stay in Paris was to be indefinite; had even let her see, if she wished to, that she counted among his reasons for staying. He was sure that he was to go far, but he knew that he must go with discretion. One thing discretion evidently required of him—to include Mademoiselle Claire with her mother; her mother constantly included her. It was necessary to invite them both to drive in the Bois next day. It was then that he learned that Madame Vicaud and her daughter both gave lessons, mademoiselle in singing,—she had studied with the best masters,—madame in the harp and piano. Damier cast a glance upon the harp; the same, no doubt. Hours of engagements had to be consulted. They could both, however, be free next day at four.

V

When the mother and daughter came in together, he could infer, even more clearly than from the bareness of the salon, from Madame Vicaud’s shabby furs and unfashionable wrap, that life, to be kept up at all with niceness and finish, must be something of a struggle for them; yet, with her small black bonnet, which she was tying with black gauze ribbons beneath her chin, her neat gloves, the poise of her shoulders, and her swift, light step, she was still unmistakably une élégante. It was natural, he supposed,—though feeling some resentment at such naturalness,—that the struggle should be the mother’s mainly; the law of maternal self-sacrifice perhaps demanded it. Claire was charmingly dressed, simply, and with a Parisienne’s unerring sense of harmony and fitness. She was neither shabby nor unfashionable; the fashion, too, expressed her, not itself.

After all, she still, though she was no longer une toute jeune fille,—she must be twenty-seven,—had her life before her, and her achievement of pretty clothes could hardly be imputed as blame to her.

The early November afternoon in the Bois was misty, with sunlight in the mist; the air was mild. Madame Vicaud’s dark eyes looked down the long vistas, seeing, perhaps, other figures in them, other pictures. Damier and Mademoiselle Vicaud talked of Italy. She had never been there, but she questioned him about Florence and Rome, and Madame Vicaud asked him if he had heard much of the old church music; and the music had been his greatest enjoyment. Madame Vicaud was fond of Palestrina, she said; but she said little of the fondness, and only listened with a half-detached, half-assenting smile while Claire and the young man went on from Gluck to Wagner. Mademoiselle Vicaud was full of admiration—though her admirations were always unemphatic—for the latter; but Madame Vicaud, though retaining, evidently, no lurking survivals of taste for the operatic music of her youth, would own only to a tempered liking for the great opera-master. She mused lightly over Damier’s demand for her preferences, and inclined to think that opera never meant much to her; it was a form of art that offended her taste almost inevitably; its appeal to the eye could so rarely justify itself, and the music, of course, was restricted by its being pinned down to definite descriptive themes.

Claire hummed out, in a melancholy, emotional contralto, a phrase from “Tristan.” “I can’t sing him—none of our French throats can; but he fills me, sweeps me up; that is all I ask of music. Mamma likes music to lift her; I like it to carry me away.” Among the deep, almost purple reds of her hair, the tawny luster of her coiling furs, her cheeks, in the keen, fresh air, glowed dimly. “No, I could not sing Wagner,” she sighed; “but I could sing. I am an artiste manquée; the one, perhaps, for being my father’s daughter, the other for being my mother’s. She would rather have me teach—try to force a little of my own energy and feeling into dough-like souls—than have me sing in public.” Mademoiselle Vicaud’s smile had no rancor as she made these statements, and her mother’s distant gaze showed no change, nor did she speak.

“It is a hard and a rather tawdry life, that of an opera-singer,” said Damier; “and, I fancy, almost an impossible one in Paris.”

“Ah, but I am tawdry,” Claire observed. If antagonism there had ever been on this subject, it had evidently long since left behind it the stage of discussion. Claire made no appeal or protest—merely stated facts.

“You see,” she went on, very much as if she and Damier were alone together, “if it were not for that artist nature, Mamma would not, perhaps, mind so much. It is because I am not—what shall we call it?—respectable? hein?—well, that will serve—that she dreads such tests for me.”

Damier now saw that, though Madame Vicaud’s silence kept all its calm, she very slightly flushed. He felt in her a something, proud and shrinking, that steeled itself to hear the jarring note of her daughter’s jest; and was it a jest? Again the contrast in the two faces struck him, this time with something of fundamental alienation in the contrast. It occupied his mind after Madame Vicaud, very unemphatically, not at all as if she felt that it needed turning, took the lead of the conversation, and while Claire, leaning back in her corner, listened with, when she was particularly addressed, her indolent “Ah!” It was, indeed, like going from one world to another to look from her mother’s face to hers. Already he felt for her a mingling of irritation and pity that was to grow as he knew her better.

How strangely she was tainted with something really almost canaille; the soft depth of her voice reeked with it. And how strangely blind must the affection of the mother be that could bridge the chasm that separated her from her daughter, unconscious—her evident devotion to her proved that—of its very existence.

VI

The salon in the Rue B—— on these occasions had some vases of flowers, and the tea, brought in by the monastic Angélique, boasted bread and butter and madeleines as well as the daily petits beurres that Damier had been offered on a more informal visit.

To the teas came old Madame Dépressier, who was of an impoverished Huguenot family, and who spent her time in works of charity, a serene woman with a large white face—a woman, Damier found on talking to her, of character and learning. She and Madame Vicaud talked of books, lectures, and poor people, and smiled much together. Madame Crécy came also, dignified, middle-aged, interested in le mouvement féministe, a writer of essays, dark, decisive, a charm in her bright ugliness. There was a dim, devout, and gentle old Comtesse de Comprailles. She had known Madame Vicaud for years, from before her marriage, and her piety had lifted her above the realization of the secular troubles of her friend, and had, indeed, kept their relation a softly superficial one. With the comtesse came sometimes a tall, thin priest, her cousin, also dim, devout, and gentle in these social relations with heretics.

There was a young Polish art-student, a girl with a thin, ardent face, and an attire manlike from its deficiency of adornment rather than from any pose. She wore very short cloth skirts,—shortened by several years of wear and mending, our acutely sympathetic young man guessed,—a knotted handkerchief around her throat, and a soft felt hat. To this young woman, who, Damier heard, had great talent and was miserably poor, Madame Vicaud showed a peculiar tenderness. Sophie Labrinska had a look at once weary and keen. She seldom spoke, but her face lighted up with a smile for her hostess, and on Tuesdays she always played to them—and played with an ungirl-like mastery and beauty of interpretation—a ballade, nocturne, or mazurka of Chopin.

Lady Vibert and her daughter came too. They lived in a tiny flat near the Bois, finding poverty in Paris more genial and resourceful than in England. Miss Vibert, a fresh-colored young woman with prominent teeth, studied art also, and for years had gone daily to a studio from which, each week, she brought back to the tiny flat a life-size torso, very neatly painted. She and her mother were cheerful, eager people, taking their Paris, their abonnement at the Théâtre Français,—a rite they religiously fulfilled,—their bi-weekly lecture at the Ecole de France, with a pleasant seriousness. Madame Vicaud lifted her eyebrows and smiled a little, though very kindly, over Miss Vibert’s artistic progress; but she was fond of her.

As for Claire, she showed little fondness, with one exception, for any of her mother’s guests. Miss Vibert talked to her in clear, high tones, but Claire spoke little to her, and only answered with her most slumberous smiles. For Sophie she had neither smiles nor words. She ignored her—but not with an effect of intentional ignoring; it was merely that the little Polish girl made no advances, and unless she were advanced to, Claire, in her mother’s salon, maintained an air of indolent detachment—except for one member of it, the only one who could be said to recall, definitely, what there was of bohemia in Madame Vicaud’s past. Monsieur Claude Daunay did no more than recall it, for his bohemianism was of a most tempered quality, consisting in a kindly indifference to smallnesses, a half-humorous choice of the unconventional rather than an ignorant imprisonment in it. He was a man of about fifty, and his massive gray head, Jovian hair and beard, his kindly, wearied eyes and stooping yet stalwart figure, made him a distinguished apparition at Madame Vicaud’s teas. She placed him, sketched him for Damier in a few words, the most open that her reserve had yet allowed her, and it was then only after a good many Tuesdays: “He knew my husband, and was very kind to him, and to me, when we were in need of kindness. He has no genius,—he, too, is a painter, you know,—but a vast appreciation, and a vast generosity in the expression of it, and much distinction of mind and talent.”

Monsieur Daunay was married, but his marriage was an unfortunate one. Madame Daunay had been the reverse of a model wife; she lived, an invalid, a life of retirement in the country, and was supposed to make much bitterness in the existence of her husband, who had his home with a vieille fille cousin in Paris. Damier liked the scholarly artist, his mild smile and air of weary unexpectancy.

It was with Monsieur Daunay that Claire was her most vivid self, with him and with their new “young” friend—though, when Monsieur Daunay was present, Damier’s relegation to the background bespoke an excellent loyalty to older ties. There was something very nearly filial in her graceful and affectionate solicitude for Monsieur Daunay. She would sweep, in trailing gowns, always a little over-perfumed,—it was the point where her taste seemed to fail her,—and always late, into the salon, and, if Monsieur Daunay were there, go at once to him after a formal acknowledgment of the other presences in the room. She did not talk much with him,—she talked more to Damier,—but while he talked to her she smiled at him, an encouraging, responsive smile.

Monsieur Daunay spoke to Damier of Madame Vicaud as une âme exquise, and of Claire as une charmante enfant, a term emphasizing his almost paternal attitude, an emphasis made more noticeable by his more formal relations with the mother. Damier saw that he was very fond of Claire, but that between him and Madame Vicaud there were no bonds closer than a courteous understanding and regard. On Tuesday, after tea and talk, music would be brought out, candles lighted at the piano, Claire would sing while Monsieur Daunay accompanied her on the piano or her mother on the harp, Sophie would play her Polish music, and Monsieur Daunay and Madame Vicaud give a solo each or a duet. There was not a trace of the amateur in these performances; the pleasure was great, and, for Damier, the charm too deep for analysis, in this listening with her, or to her, in the quiet room, among these quiet, subdued, rather sad people.

He was still, in a sense, outside the barrier, but they all were, he fancied, in the sense he meant. These Tuesdays were the nearest, really, that any of them ever came to her. Yet they were more definitely accepted as friends: he was still the onlooker.

It was only humorously that he resented his slow advance to a more individual standing. He could hardly himself measure it; and yet he felt that he was being observed, weighed, thought over, and, almost imperceptibly, that her smile for him gained in meaning.

VII

She turned her head with her smile of welcome, and, as he drew a chair near hers, lightly touched a harp-string. The throb of the vibrant note echoed in the young man’s heart. For the first time, after a winter of patient waiting, he was alone with his mystery, alone with the woman he adored; for that he adored this cold, sweet, faded woman, with her fragrant life blossoming on its black background, was as much a fact of his existence as that he had seen her photograph on that distant sunny day.

“My work is over,” she said. “I am feeling indolent. Ah, you have brought the book; thank you. Will you read it now to me—a little?” She leaned back, smiling still; her eyes, he felt, studying him more openly, yet more kindly, than ever before. “Will you ring for the candles then, or would you rather sit on for a little while in this blindman’s holiday?”

“I would rather sit on, and have you play to me, if you are not too tired.”

“I am tired of teaching—of listening, not of playing.” She at once adjusted her foot, stretched her arms, bending to the instrument, and played an old and plaintive melody.

“Exquisite,” said Damier, when it ended. “It is so staid in form, yet so melancholy in feeling.”

“Yes; like the melancholy of a sad heart, whispering its sorrow to itself under the lace and brocade of a long-dead epoch.” She went on to a joyous little pastoral, and said, smiling at him, that that was like a bank of primroses; and, after the next, “And that all innocent solemnity and sweetness, like a nun’s prayer.” And when she had finished they sat in silence for some time.

“Have you always played?” he asked her at last, seeing her suddenly as a young girl in a white dress, with a green ribbon around her waist, an emerald locket at her throat, sitting at her harp.

“Always; I learned when I was a child.” The unspoken sadness of the past seemed to steal about them; he seemed to hear the “sad heart whispering to itself” as they sat there in the firelight.

“I have often thought,” Madame Vicaud said, turning suddenly toward him and smiling with a touch of constraint, “that it was very nice of you to seek us out like this. I have often wanted to speak to you about it. For it was you rather than Mrs. Mostyn who sought, was it not? What made you think of it?” she asked, her smile growing in sweetness as his eyes dwelt on hers.

“It was a very romantic reason,” Damier said; “or, no, I won’t belittle my reason by that trivial term; it was a very serious reason, rather, a very real one. I saw your photograph in an album belonging to Mrs. Mostyn, and then I wanted to see you.”

She looked at him in silence.

“How very strange!” she presently said. “Wanted enough for that?”

“To seek you? Quite enough; more.” He smiled. “Yes, it was strange—is strange. I did not know whether you were alive or dead, nor did Mrs. Mostyn.”

“And you set out in quest of me?”

“Yes, after a time. At first Mrs. Mostyn could hear nothing of you. I met another old acquaintance of yours—Sir Henry Quarle. He talked to me about you, too, and immediately afterward I got your address from Mrs. Mostyn and her letter to you. Then I set out at once.”

Madame Vicaud looked at him with a grave, speculating look for some silent moments, before saying, turning her eyes away and once more showing constraint in her voice:

“You heard that I had been unfortunate—unhappy? You were sorry for that?”

“Yes; but had you been very fortunate, very happy, I should still have looked for you.”

“But why? Did you like my face so much?”

“So much. I felt that I should have known you long ago, and that, having missed you for so long through the stupid accident of the years, I must know you always in the future. I should have felt it had you been dead.” His charming eyes dwelling on her with a perfect candor and simplicity, for it was easy at last to speak these familiar thoughts to her, he added: “I needed you; I had always needed you. And so, it seemed to me, you needed me; your eyes in the photograph called to me.”

At this she looked swiftly at him with an astonishment that slowly softened to a smile. “You are a strange, a good friend,” she said.

“You accept me as such?”

“Ah, yes,” she replied, “I accept you as such—gratefully. I don’t call you. Those days are over.”

She rose, pushing the harp aside, and walked slowly down the room, pausing at the window and looking out. He divined that she was much touched, even that there were tears in her eyes. He feared to show her the depths of his feeling for her, his longing to enter her life, help her, if it might be, in it; but, rising too, he said in a slightly trembling voice: “You don’t need my friendship, but I need yours. Let that be my claim.”

“Your claim to what?” she asked, her face still turned from him.

“To the hope that I may grow into your confidence—the hope that you will lean on me, trust me completely, and that, with time, I may, perhaps, mean something to you of what you mean to me.”

Her face now, as she looked at him, showed a curious, a vivid look of wonder, humor, tenderness, and sadness.

“What am I, that I should mean so much to you? You don’t know me.”

“Is that your kind way of intimating that I can mean nothing to you—that you don’t know me?” he smiled.

“Ah, don’t think that I am so hard and stupid!” she said quickly. “Don’t think that I am fencing with you, trying to ward off a friendship I can’t appreciate. Don’t think that I have no need of a friend. I have; I have—only I had forgotten to feel it. I do not say that I have no friends; you know that I have, and good ones—only you do not wish to rank with them. Isn’t it so?” She smiled swiftly, from her gravity, at him. “There is good Madame Dépressier, and the comtesse, and little Sophie,—who needs me, poor child, in her struggle and loneliness,—and the others, true and good all; but none near. You would be near,—would you not?—and have me share pain with you—lean on you, you say.” His fine young face, stern with eagerness, followed her words in silent assent. “But it would be difficult for me to have such a friend. I have never had such a friend. It is difficult, painful to me to show myself, be myself. I am a hard, I fear a spoiled, stunted nature. You heard—of course you must have heard; it is the one thing that anybody must hear who hears at all of me—that my marriage was very unhappy. It warped me; it froze me. There was no one to help me when I needed help, or to hear me, even had I not been too proud to call, and I lost the power of appeal or self-expression. If I had been gentler, less bitter in my despair, less rebellious, I might have kept more in touch with life, been more natural, more responsive. As it is, I can still feel—deeply, deeply; but it is hard for me to respond. I am old enough to be your mother. No? Well, almost.” She smiled slightly at his exactitude. “I am very different from the girl in the photograph whose eyes called to you—prophetic eyes they must have been! You must not expect fine things of me; you must not idealize me.” She put her hand gently, maternally on his shoulder. “Never idealize me. That is a dangerous—a terrible thing to do.”

“Can you look at me,” he asked, putting his hand on hers—“can you look at me and think that I could idealize you?—see you as anything else than you are? Don’t you feel that, indeed, I can see you much more clearly than you see yourself—the girl in the photograph, and the woman old enough, almost old enough, to be my mother? You are shut into your present. I see you in it—and in all your past.”

She stood looking gravely into his eyes as he looked into hers. In hers there was—not seen by him and hardly felt by herself—a swiftly passing, an immense regret, an immense sadness. It was like the sweeping shadow of a flying wing, and left only the limpidity of sweetest, most candid acquiescence. In his eyes, too, there was regret—passionate regret; and he felt it, and felt that she could not understand or read it, nor the vague, strong hope that so strangely informed it.

“So I have a friend, a new yet an old friend,” said Madame Vicaud. “You perplex me, but I believe in all you say. You give me great happiness.”

He lifted the hand under his and bent his lips to it. She looked down at his bowed head with a smile that was a benediction.

On that first day of their friendship, as they sat together, she again before her harp, it was, oddly, he who leaned and confided. Almost boyishly, under her comprehending eyes, he unfolded for her his life, its deepest efforts and its deepest disappointments. Madame Vicaud, while he talked and she questioned, drew her fingers softly, from time to time, across her harp-strings. He never forgot the hour, nor the sense of communion that the silvery ripple of the harp-strings made paradisiacal.

“And will you not marry? Have you not thought of marrying?” she asked.

He considered her with what he knew to be a whimsical smile at her unconsciousness.

“I have been too great a coward ever to get further than thinking of it. My love-affairs have rarely passed the speculative stage. My ideals of marriage are of a most exacting nature.”

“Ah, that is well,” she said. “Never lower them to fit some reality that, for the moment, appeals. I hope,” she added, “that you will some day find the woman who realizes them.”

No, the silly accident oi the years too much blinded her, Damier felt, for her to see, yet, that she was the woman. He himself was too much dazzled to see beyond the fact itself. Any question of love or marriage seemed irrelevant, did not enter at all into this wonderful and happy place where her harp rippled, her eyes smiled, where she understood that he had found her.

VIII

The nearer intimacy with the mother did not bring Damier into nearer intimacy with the daughter, for the simple reason that he was already so intimate. From the first Damier had felt that he understood Claire Vicaud. He could not yet clearly define what he understood, but she could have no revelations for him. Her father explained her, and her mother reclaimed her. That was her history, and he imagined that neither she nor her mother was aware of the history, but the mother less than she. Indeed, he fancied, at times, that he saw her far more clearly than did the mother—hoped that the mother had not his direct vision.

He was rather fond of Claire, with a fondness tolerant, humorous, and pitying. What he saw in her were thwarted energies, well thwarted, yet pathetic in their enforced composure; he saw voiceless rebellion, and the dumb discomfort of a creature reared in an environment not its own. This simile might have cast a reproach upon the mother had it conjured up the vision of an unkindly caged pantheress; but the simile so seen was too poetical for Claire. It was not the wild, fine, free thing of nature that circumstance had caged, but the product of over-civilized senses—senses only, and corrupt senses. There was the point that made her piteous and repellent.

Claire’s claim on life was not a high one. Hers was not even an esthetic fastidiousness of sense nor a romantic coloring of emotion; there was nothing delicate or warm or eager about her. Her wishes were not yearnings; they were steadfast inclinations toward all the evident, the palpable, perhaps the baser pleasures of life, pleasures that would most certainly have been hers had not fate—in the shape of a mother to whom these pleasures were non-existent rather than despicable—lifted her above the possible grasp at them: jewels, clothes, magnificent establishments, riotous living. She was cold, but she would welcome passively the warmth of admiration about her. She had not her father’s genius to transmute the tawdry cravings of her inheritance from him. She had his quick, clear intelligence, and it seemed only to make harder, more decisive, her centering in self.

Damier could see her as the painted prima donna (never as the sincere and serious artist), bowing her languorous triumph before the curtain; could see her laughing in ugly mirth at Gallic jests among a crowd of clever rapins; could horribly image her—most horribly when one remembered who was her mother—rolling in a lightly swung carriage down the Avenue des Acacias, a modern Cleopatra in her barge, alluring in indifference under her parasol, and dressed with the consummate and conscious art that does not flower in the sound soil of respectability. These were, indeed, horrid thoughts, and as absurd as horrid when the mother stood beside them. Even to think them seemed to put a dagger into a heart already many times stabbed. Yet separate mother and daughter,—it was ominously easy so to separate them,—and nothing in Claire reproached and contradicted such images. Inevitably they arose, and, as inevitably, the companion picture of the mother, like a transfixed Mater Dolorosa.

To the mother he felt that in giving interest and attention to Claire he rendered a service more grateful to her than any homage. He proposed that he should take Claire for walks sometimes, and he felt something of the staidness of the girl’s upbringing in Madame Vicaud’s acquiescence, in its implied trust—a trust that waived a custom in his favor. It expressed the mother’s attitude against all that was lax or undignified in life. Claire could go with him, their friend, but, Claire told him with a light laugh, she seldom went out alone. “Only sometimes with Monsieur Daunay—but he is like a father, almost; and to the dressmaker’s; and almost always Mamma is with me—we are such companions, you know.” Damier could not quite determine as to possible irony in her placid tones. He looked upon these walks with Claire—they would cross the Seine, looking up at Carpeaux’s jocund group on the Pavillon de Flore, and pace sedately in the Tuileries Gardens or up the Champs-Elysées—as expressions of his identification of himself with Madame Vicaud’s interests, for he always felt that it pleased her that he should ask Claire to go; yet, after each one of them, he could not defend himself from the strange sensation that he had been in an atmosphere disloyal to his friend. The atmosphere was so different, yet so subtly different, when Claire was alone with him, or with him and her mother. So subtle was the difference that any remonstrance on his part might constitute a stupid rebuff to her unconsciousness; yet so different were her tones, her look, her laugh, so different the quality of her frankness, its gaillardise, as it were, and its familiarity, almost insolent in its assurance—so different were all these that he could hardly believe her unconscious of the change. He did understand her; that was the trouble: for she acted as if he did, and as if all pretenses were unnecessary between them, and free breathing a relief to both after a burdensome atmosphere. Damier, while they walked, showed a grave kindliness, listened to her, assented or dissented with a careful accuracy that amused himself. He was not quite sure why, with Claire, he seldom felt it safe to be flexible or flippant; some dim instinct of self-protection before this embryotic soul and quick intelligence made him guard himself against all misinterpretations, made him scrupulous in defining the differences between them. Claire referred little to her mother, and then, at least in the beginnings of their intercourse, in the tones of commonplace respect, with something of the effect, he more and more realized, of shuffling aside an excellence that they both took for granted but hardly cared to linger over—she certainly did not, though he might have odd, pretty tastes for the past and done with.

What to him was poetry—for, to a certain extent, she seemed to appreciate his attitude toward her mother—was to her the mere furniture of life. Damier resented, but for some time was helpless; she gave him no occasion for declaration or defense. Once or twice, when, à propos de bottes, as far as actual comment was required, he seriously spoke of his deep admiration for her mother, Claire listened with a cela-va-sans-dire expression vastly baffling. Only by degrees, and only after some definite sharpnesses on his side, did she seem to realize that, in including him in her own casual attitude toward her mother, she not only misinterpreted but irritated and antagonized him. After that realization she never so offended again. Indeed, with an air of honoring his fantastic sensitiveness, yet with gravity, as if to show him that she, too, could appreciate moral charm, the pathos of defeat and finality, she often alluded to her mother’s fine and gracious qualities; but, in spite of this concession, Damier was still aware of the indefinable difference that made the atmosphere seem disloyal.

She said one day: “You have really decided to live in Paris—for ever and ever—hein? Is it we you are studying? Do you find us interesting?”

“Very,” replied Damier.

“But the world is full of so many more interesting people,” said Claire, “than two ladies, one almost old and one rapidly leaving her youth behind her, who live the narrowest of lives and give lessons to make butter for their bread.”

“I have not met many more interesting.”

“Then it is—to study us?” Her sleepy smile was upon him.

Damier had certainly no intention of confiding in Claire the reasons for his stay in Paris, feeling suddenly, indeed, that the young woman herself formed a rather serious problem in all practical considerations of these reasons; yet the attitude implied in her question demanded a negative. “No, it isn’t because I am studying you; it is because I am fond of you,” he said, bringing out the words with a touch of awkwardness, feeling their simplicity to be almost crude.

Claire was reflectively silent for some moments, observing his face, he knew, though he was not looking at her.

“Vous êtes un original,” she said at last, with quite the manner of her race when abandoning, as impenetrable to rational probes, some specimen of British eccentricity.

On another day a little incident occurred, slight, yet destined to impress Damier with a deeper sense of Claire’s unsoundness. They were walking down the Champs-Elysées, in the windy brightness of a March afternoon, when, in the distance, near the Rond Point, they discerned the easily recognizable figure of Monsieur Daunay. Claire, as this old friend appeared upon the field of vision, put her hand in Damier’s arm and, drawing him toward one of the smaller streets that slope down to the spacious avenue, said, smiling unemphatically: “Don’t let us meet him.”

“Why not?” Damier inquired, surprised, and conscious in his surprise of a quick hostility to Claire and to her smiling look of dexterous evasion.

“He hasn’t seen us—come,” she insisted, though the insistence was still veiled in humor.

“Why should he not see us? I shall be glad to see him.”

Her eyes measured Monsieur Daunay’s distance before she said, with something of impatience at his slowness of comprehension: “He will be shocked—think it improper—our walking out alone like this.” Damier stared at her, stolidly resistant to the soft pull of her hand.

“Improper? Your mother consenting—you an Englishwoman, I an Englishman?”

“He is a Frenchman, and I am half French; you seem to forget that, both you and Mamma, at times.” If she was irritated with him she successfully controlled her irritation, and Monsieur Daunay was so near that flight before his misinterpretation was impossible. She evidently resigned herself to the situation of Damier’s making—let him feel, with a shrug of her shoulders, that it was of his making indeed, but, by a half-indifferent, half-ironic smile, that he was forgiven; he must be strong enough for both of them, the smile said.

Monsieur Daunay approached, doffing his hat, and Damier at once perceived that there was certainly in his eye a cogitation very courteous, but altogether out of keeping, he thought, with the importance of its cause. He himself felt absent-minded, his thoughts engaged more with the analysis of the new and disagreeable sensation Claire had given him than with the sensations she might have given Monsieur Daunay. He replied somewhat vaguely to Monsieur Daunay’s salutations, and, not so vaguely, heard Claire saying, “Mamma has sent us out for a walk.”

“Fine weather for walking,” Monsieur Daunay replied, looking away from the young woman up at the vivid spring sky and round at the expansive day, all wind, sunlight, and sauntering groups of people.

“You often walk here?” he continued pleasantly.

“Not so often; I am too hard worked to get a frequent holiday: but Mr. Damier takes us out sometimes.”

“Madame Vicaud is at home?”

“Yes; she has pupils, or she would have been with us.”

“She is well, I trust?”

“Very well. We shall see you at tea to-morrow?” Claire laid a gently urgent hand upon his arm. “I have been practising the Gluck. I think you will be pleased with it. You will come?”

“With great pleasure, as always,” said the Frenchman, but still with something of unwonted gravity beneath his apparent ease.

They parted, and Claire and Damier walked on.

“He was shocked,” said Claire, mildly.

Monsieur Daunay might or might not be shocked, but Damier felt that he himself was, more so than he could quite account for. He fixed upon that wholly unnecessary half-untruth of hers; he could not let it pass.

“We have often come here; your mother has only once come with us,” he said, with the effect of cold shyness that his displeasure usually took; it always required an effort of distinct courage on Eustace Damier’s part to express displeasure.

“There was no necessity for him to know that,” she returned, adding, with a laugh: “Now I have shocked both of you—he in his convenances, you in your English veracity. I don’t mind fibbing in the least, I must tell you.”

“Don’t you?” His displeasure was now determined to show its definite coolness.

“Not in the least,” said Claire, with perfect good humor, “in myself or in others”; and she added, with a little laugh at herself, “unless other people’s fibs interfere with mine; but I think that I mind their fibs interfering less than their truths.”

Damier resigned himself to feeling that, after all, he was thoroughly prepared for any such developments in Claire; it was the tragedy in the thought of the other Clara that was knocking at his heart.

IX

Damier wished to bring Madame Vicaud and Lady Surfex together. He had plans, and was vastly amused to realize that they were of a quite paternal character. These plans did not go beyond the thought that a widening of Claire’s life might be an excellent thing for her, and, as a result, a happy thing for her mother. To see Claire well, safely, happily married, would not this be the lifting of a problem from the mother’s heart? As yet he had not gone further and told himself that it would leave the mother’s heart freer for the contemplation of other problems. Now Claire’s chances of a prosperous marriage would certainly be multiplied if he could bring around her and her mother a few such friends as Lady Surfex. He spoke to her, on his first visit to her, of the Vicauds, and of his wish that they might meet. “The charming Clara Chanfrey!” Lady Surfex said. (With what a chime all allusions to Clara Chanfrey always began, to end with such funereal tolling!) “Ah, you make me feel how old I am becoming, for how often in my girlhood I heard my mother speak of her! She always spoke severely. Mother belonged to the old régime, you know—saw things steadily, and saw them whole, perhaps, but rather narrowly, and only one thing at a time. She couldn’t take in, as it were, the extenuations of circumstance. And she was a great friend of Lady Chanfrey’s. Lady Chanfrey infected all her allies with her own bitterness. But the memory of the daughter’s charm came through it. She was like her father, not like her mother. I never liked the little I remember of Lady Chanfrey. But I have heard of Madame Vicaud since I used to hear of her from mother, and, I am sorry to say, more and more sadly.”

“All I hear of her is sad,” said Damier. “Every echo from her past is a groan!”

“Poor woman!” Lady Surfex mused. “First the awful husband, and then the, to say the least of it, trying daughter.”

Damier’s heart stiffened. “Trying? In what way—I may ask?”

“Of course you may—you know them so well; and, as I see, your sympathy is all with the mother. Well, I am afraid she is altogether trying, but the instance of which I was thinking deserves a severer adjective. Some friends of mine in Cheshire, nice, quiet people, had always kept more or less in touch with Madame Vicaud during her stormy life. They did not meet, but they sometimes wrote. Mrs. Barnett and she had been friends in girlhood. Claire, when she grew up, went to stay with them. Very beautiful, very clever, singing wonderfully, yet, from the beginning, she struck a false note. And then there was the ugly little story: a young man, Captain Dauncey, fell madly in love with her; they were engaged; and, within hardly a month’s time, she jilted him openly and brazenly for a better match. That was only the beginning. Sir Everard Comber was madly in love, too, but Mrs. Barnett told me that they felt that he knew there was no good metal under her glamour; the glamour was so great that he hoodwinked himself. It was tragic to see him trying not to see. And one day he and Mrs. Barnett found Mademoiselle Vicaud engaged in a flirtation in an arbor, indolently allowing an adoring young man to kiss her hand, his arm around her waist. Mrs. Barnett said that it was the most unpleasant of situations—poor Sir Everard’s face, the girl’s look of dismay, followed by an instant assumption of coolness. She was able, almost at once, to show a humorous, half-vexed, half-tolerant smile, and to pretend that she expected them to share her playful anger against the hugely embarrassed culprit. She behaved, afterward, very badly about Sir Everard’s breaking off the engagement, which he did most delicately and generously. She had no dignity; she was furious, and showed that she was. She even hinted once—only once, but it was enough—at a breach-of-promise suit and damages.

“Madame Vicaud appeared in the midst of the commotion, and quenched in a moment the ugly flicker of vulgarity. The Barnetts guessed that there must have been a terrible scene between the two, but Madame Vicaud carried off her daughter, completely quelled, it seemed. She could not save the situation; she merely made it tragic instead of odious. That is the story,” said Lady Surfex, after a pause in which Damier, with a whitened face, kept a sick silence—“only the story, after all, of a vulgar girl who makes her mother piteous.

“I should love to meet Madame Vicaud. She does not know that I know, nor, I think, does the girl. The best thing, I fancy, would be if the girl could be married off to somebody who understood—and didn’t mind. Don’t you think so? Could we try to help Madame Vicaud like that?”

Damier could not think just now of Claire’s future; he was thinking, persistently, of Madame Vicaud—seeing her as a white flower sunken up to the brave and fragile petals in mud. The past clung to her in her daughter—greedy, husband-hunting, lax, and vulgar. What must the tortured mother’s heart have felt at this heaping of shame upon her proudest head? How, more and more, he understood, and interpreted, her silences, her reserves!

In a dry voice he said that he could hardly hope for any possible atonement to Madame Vicaud.

“Have I been wrong in telling you—ungenerous?” asked Lady Surfex.

“No; right. It makes one more able to help her; or, at least, to feel where she most needs help. It is only in lifting the daughter that one can help her.”

“We will lift her!” said Lady Surfex, with a glance at his absorbed face. “And then, if we do,—right out of the mother’s life,—what will she do alone?”

“She would never allow her to be lifted out of her life.”

“Well, only in the literal sense of going away to live with her husband.”

“Her husband! It seems a difficult thing to find her one!”

“Not so much to find one—she is enchanting in appearance, I hear—as to keep one. But no doubt she is wiser, better, now. And would you, Eustace, live on in Paris indefinitely if the girl married and left her mother alone? Is your friendship so absorbing?”

He was able to look at her now with a smile for her acuteness.

“Quite so absorbing.”

X

It was, curiously, with a keener throb of pity, in the very midst of all his new reasons for disliking her, that he found her alone in the salon, sitting, in her white evening dress, near the open window—opened on the warm spring twilight. There was something of lassitude in her posture, the half-droop of her head as she stared vaguely at the sky, something of passive, patient strength, a creature that no one could love—even—even—he had wondered over it more and more of late—her mother? The wonder never came without a sense of fear for the desecration that such a thought implied in its forcing itself into an inner shrine of sorrow.

His vision in all that concerned the woman he loved had something of a clairvoyant quality. At times he felt himself closing his ears, shutting his eyes, to whispers, glimpses, which as yet he had no right to see or hear.

That evening he was to dine with Madame Vicaud, Claire, and little Sophie; and Claire’s gown, he felt in prospective, would make poor Sophie’s ill-fitting blouse look odd by contrast in the box at the theater where he was afterward to take them. He had, indeed, never seen the girl look more lovely. His over-early arrival had had as its object the hope of finding, not the daughter, but the mother, alone. Yet, sitting there in the quiet evening air, talking quietly, looking from dim tree-tops outside to Claire’s white form and splendid head, he felt that the unasked-for hour had its interest, even its charm. Claire did not charm him, but the mystery of her deep thoughts and shallow heart was as alluring to his mind as the merely pictorial attraction of her beauty to his eye.

“The chief thing,” said Claire,—they had been talking in a desultory fashion about life, and in speaking she stretched out her arm in its transparent sleeve and looked at it with her placid, powerful look, adjusting its fall of lace over her hand,—“the chief thing is to know what you want and to determine to get it. People who do that get what they want, you know—unless circumstances are peculiarly antagonistic.” (Damier, in the light of his recent knowledge, found this phrase very pregnant.) “You, for instance, have never known exactly what you wanted; therefore you have got nothing. My father knew that he wanted to paint well—you rarely hear us speak of my father, do you?—though Mamma, you see, has his photograph conspicuously en évidence up there, lest I should think too ill of him—or guess how ill she thinks of him herself. I hardly knew my father at all; he was, no doubt, what is called a very bad man, but clever, very clever. He determined to paint well, and he did. You know his pictures. I don’t care about pictures, but I suppose there are few of that epoch that can be compared to that Luxembourg canvas of his. Mamma, do you know, never goes to see it. She has never really recovered from the shock poor papa gave her prejudices—the prejudices of the jeune fille anglaise. I”—she smiled a little at him, gliding quickly past the silent displeasure that her last words had evoked in his expression—“I have a very restricted field for choice; but I determine to be well dressed. I have small aims, you say; but with me, as yet, circumstances are very antagonistic. I should like many pleasures, but as there is only one I can achieve, I am wise as well as determined; what I do determine comes to pass. And Mamma—yes, I am coming to her. Mamma wanted to be good, and she is, you see, perfectly good. And, even more than that, perhaps, she wanted me to be good, too; but there either her will was too weak or I too wicked—the latter, probably, for she has a strong will.”

“Perhaps,” said Damier, smiling as he leaned back in his chair, arms folded and knees crossed, listening to her—“perhaps you underestimate her success, or overestimate the Luciferian splendor of your own nature.”

“I don’t think it is at all splendid,” said Claire, composedly; “some wickedness is, I grant you; but do I strike you as affecting that kind?”

“I must own that you don’t.”

“Or, indeed, as affecting anything either picturesque or desirable?” she pursued.

Again Damier had to own that she affected no such thing.

“Ah, that is well. I should not like you to misinterpret me,” said Claire. “I make no poses.” And after a slight pause in which he wondered anew over her, she added: “I merely like enjoyment better than anything else in the world.”

“Yours, you know, is a very old philosophy—a universe of will and enjoyment; but one must have a great deal of the former to attain the latter in a world of so many clashing aims,” said Damier.

“Yes, one must.”

“And not the highest type of will. The world, so seen, is a terrible one.”

“Do you think so?” Her look, from the sky, drifted lazily down to him.

“Don’t you?”

“No; I think it wonderful, enthralling, if one attains one’s aims; it is all beautiful, even the suffering—if one avoids suffering one’s self.”

“You are an esthete—

While safe beneath the roof,
To hear with drowsy ear the plash of rain.”

“Oh, better than rain—the tempest!”

“And how can one avoid suffering, pray?”

“Mais,”—Claire had a tolerant smile for his naïveté,—“by staying under the roof, laughing round the fire. Mamma, you see, would be darting out continually into the storm.”

“Bringing other people back to shelter.”

“And crowding us uncomfortably round the fire, getting the rest of us wet!” smiled Claire. “For a case in point—don’t you find Sophie a bore? She was going to commit suicide when Mamma, through something Miss Vibert said, found her. Yes, I assure you, the charcoal was lit—her last sous spent on it. And really, do you know, I think it would have been a wise thing. Don’t be too much horrified at my heartlessness. I mean that Sophie will never enjoy herself; nothing in this world will ever satisfy her. When she has enough to eat she can realize more clearly her higher wants. And—I don’t want to seem more ungenerous than I am, but, as a result, we have less to eat ourselves. Don’t look so stony; I am not really un mauvais cœur. I would willingly dot Sophie, buy her the best husband procurable if I had the money; but husbands and houses and money wouldn’t make Sophie comfortable, and I don’t really see that much is gained by making two people less so in order to insure the survival of one unfit little Pole.”

“I need hardly tell you that I don’t share the ruthless materialism of that creed. Who, my dear young woman, are you, to pronounce on Sophie’s unfitness, and to decide that you, rather than she, have a right to survival?”

Claire looked at him for a moment with a smile unresentful and yet rueful.

“How often you surprise me,” she said, “and how often you make me feel that I don’t, even yet, quite understand you! It is so difficult to realize that a person so comprehending can at the same time be so rigid. With you tout comprendre is not tout pardonner.”

“By no means,” Damier owned, unable to repress a smile.

“Well, I would far rather have you understand me completely, even if you can’t forgive. I told you that I was wicked; one good point I have: I never pretend to be better than I am.”

“And one better point you have, and that is that you are better than you know.” Damier spoke lightly, but at the moment he believed what he spoke.

Claire smiled without replying, and said, after a little silence:

“Of course you have seen how good Mamma is. You both of you have a moral perfume, and recognize it in each other. I puzzle and worry her so because I won’t suffer, won’t go out of my life into other people’s. You asked me how one could avoid suffering; really, for the most part, it is very easy to avoid. Sympathy is the fatal thing: to suffer with—why should one? It is a mere increasing of the suffering in the world, if one comes to think of it. The wise thing is to concentrate one’s self—to bring things to one’s self; but it is that wisdom that Mamma will not understand in me.”

Damier made no comment on these assertions, and Claire, as if she had expected none, as if, indeed, she were expounding herself and her mother for her own benefit as well as his, went on:

“She is very energetic, too, Mamma, as energetic as I am, but in a different way. She is always striving—against things; I wait. Even if she can’t see distinctly at what she is aiming, she is always aiming at something; I never aim unless I see something to aim at.”

“What things do you aim at?” he now asked.

“Oh—you know; things that Mamma despises—things that you too despise, perhaps, but that, at all events, you understand.” He could not quite interpret the glance that rested upon him. “And Mamma’s aims—I suppose you don’t care to hear what I think of them?”

“On the contrary, for you think very clearly. But I know what she has aimed at. What has she attained?”

He asked himself the question, indeed, with an inner lamentation for the one evident, the one tragic failure.

“Well,”—Claire clasped her hands behind her head and looked out of the window,—“for one thing, she has kept herself—she hasn’t attained it: that wasn’t needful—très grande dame. She has always made herself a social milieu congenial to her, or gone without one. For herself she would not choose and exclude so carefully; but I complicate Mamma’s spontaneous impulses. The social milieu has always been to her a soil in which to try to grow my soul; that is why she is so careful about the soil; if it were not for me she would probably choose the stoniest and ugliest, and beautify it by blooming in it, since her soul is strong and beneficent.”

Half repelled and half attracted as Damier had been, it was now with more of attraction than repulsion that he listened, an attraction that had many sources. That she should so finely appreciate her mother was one. It was touching—meant to be so, perhaps, for even in his attraction he had these moments of doubt; but a sincerity that could paint herself so unbecomingly and her mother so beautifully was a new revelation of her frankness. There was attraction, too, though of a mingled quality, in her strength and in her apparent indifference to his impression of her. These were better things than the glamour; yet that, too, he felt, as when she turned her eyes on him and said that the world was beautiful. At such moments something joyous and conscienceless in him responded to her, half intellectual comprehension and half mere flesh and blood. It was a little swirl of emotion that his soul, calm and disdainfully aloof, could look down on and observe, in no danger of being shaken by it; but it did swirl through him like a tremulous coil of Venusberg music; and Claire, in her transparent white, with her heavy braids and grave, shining eyes, gleamed at such moments with the baleful beauty of the eternal siren. As long as one was human something human in one must respond to that siren call. Even now, when he was feeling, with some bewilderment, better things in her, the glamour looking from her eyes, breathing from her serious lips, confused and troubled the new impulse of trust and pity. Half lightly, half sadly, yet with a very gentle kindliness, he said to her: “Strong enough to make you flower some day, let us believe”; and, as silently she still gazed upon him: “That you should recognize beauty is already a flower, you know.”

Still leaning back, her arms behind her head, still looking at him, Claire now said: “I owe that flower, not to her, but to you.”

He stared for a moment, not comprehending.

“You mean that you see her, appreciate her, through my sight, my appreciation?”

“Yes—in a sense, I mean that.”

“But,” said Damier, smiling, “you owe it to her that there is something beautiful to see.”

He was mystified, not quite trusting, yet touched.

Claire, without moving, turned her eyes on the door. “Here she is,” she said; and as her mother entered, she added, in the lowest voice above a whisper, so vaguely that it was like a fragrant perturbing influence breathing from the twilight and the spring air:

“I like to owe all my flowers to you.”

Already, as he rose to greet the mother, he liked the daughter less.

Madame Vicaud, in her black dress, with flowing white about her wrists and throat,—a throat erect and beautiful,—had closed the door softly behind her, and as she came toward him, Damier, involuntarily carrying further his Venusberg simile of some moments before, thought of an Elizabeth bringing peace and radiance; yet there was, too, a gravity in her gaze, a quick intentness that went swiftly from her daughter to him. Then the smile and the lightness masked her. She took his hand.

“Has not Sophie come yet? Of what have you been talking?”

“Of life, and how to live it,” laughed Damier.

“Wise young people! Was it a contest of sublimities?” Madame Vicaud laid down the evening wrap she had brought in, and, it seemed to Damier, averted her face from him as she took up a box of matches.

“Do I ever fight under the banner of sublimity, Mamma?” Claire inquired, looking out of the window, showing once more her accustomed lassitude and detachment. “I leave those becoming colors to you—and to Mr. Damier.”

“But don’t, even in jest, my dear, assume always the unbecoming ones,” Madame Vicaud replied, still with all her lightness, and bending, her face still averted, to strike a match. “You have discovered, have you not, Mr. Damier, that it is difficult for Claire to assume the virtues that she has?”

She moved about the room, lighting the candles on the mantelpiece and on the cabinet where her husband’s portrait stood; and Damier, watching the swift blackness of her girlish figure, the slender white of her uplifted hand,—the black more black, the white more white, as the radiance slowly grew in the dim room,—still fancied that she was mastering some emotion, hiding from him some sudden agitation. There was a faint flush on her face as she turned, gaily and sweetly, blowing out and tossing away her match, to welcome Sophie.

XI

It was odd, this hint of withdrawal and formality, in the midst of a greater kindness, when Claire occupied so much more conspicuously the foreground. She was now always with her mother; was a third in all talks and readings, listening, with eyes almost ironically vacant, her hands lying beautifully indolent in her lap, while Damier read aloud and her mother sewed. Claire did not seem to have stepped forward, but her mother seemed to have stepped back; and from the background—a mysterious one to his odd, new apprehension of things—she smiled more tenderly than before, and with yet a tremor, an intentness, as though expecting him to understand more than she could look.

And all this might be merely an emotional color in his own outlook on unchanged facts, but the color certainly was there, making a faintly tinted difference over all the mental landscape.

It was during the first days of this dim perplexity that he found himself alone once more with Madame Vicaud. He had outstayed all her guests on a Tuesday afternoon, and, the Viberts having taken Claire back to dine with them, Madame Vicaud asked the young man to share her solitude.

Now, when they were alone, and while he sat cutting the leaves of a new book they were to read together, she went about the room, putting things back in their places, closing the piano—a little restless in her restoration of composure to the room.

Presently she came to him, stood beside him, looking down at the book. “Always friends, you know,” she said, putting a hand on his shoulder and speaking lightly, almost incidentally.

“Why not?” Damier asked, looking up at her.

“Indeed, why not?” she returned, smiling. “Nothing, I hope, would ever change our friendship.”

“Nothing could.” She stood silently beside him, looking down, not at him, but at the volume of essays, and he added: “You will tell me if you are ever in any trouble or sorrow where I could help you, if ever so little?”