Frances Waldeaux | Page 8

in your judgment."
"Don't make yourself unpleasant, George," said his mother gently. Miss Vance smiled icily, and as the girls came near again, stopped them and stood talking to Mlle. Arpent with an aggressive show of familiarity.
"Why do you worry Clara?" said Mrs. Waldeaux. "She knows she has made a mistake. What do you think of that little blonde girl?" she asked presently, watching him anxiously. "She has remarkable beauty, certainly; but there is something finical--precise----"
"Take care. She will hear you," said George. "Beauty, eh? Oh, I don't know," indifferently. "She is passably pretty. I have never seen a woman yet whose beauty satisfied ME."
Mrs. Waldeaux leaned back with a comfortable little laugh. "But you must not be so hard to please, my son. You must bring me my daughter soon," she said.
"Not very soon. I have some thing else to think of than marriage for the next ten years."
Just then Dr. Watts came up and asked leave to present his friend Perry. The doctor, like all young men who knew Mrs. Waldeaux, had succumbed to her peculiar charm, which was only that of a woman past her youth who had strong personal magnetism and not a spark of coquetry. George's friends all were sure that they would fall in love with a woman just like her--but not a man of them ever thought of falling in love with her.
Young Perry, in twenty minutes, decided that she was the most brilliant and agreeable of companions. He had talked, and she had spoken only with her listening, sympathetic eyes. He was always apt to be voluble. On this occasion he was too voluble. "You are from Weir, I think, in Delaware, Mrs. Waldeaux?" he asked. "I must have seen the name of the town with yours on the list of passengers, for the story of a woman who once lived there has been haunting me all day. I have not seen nor thought of her for years, and I could not account for my sudden remembrance of her."
"Who was she?" asked George, trying to save his mother from Perry, who threatened to be a bore.
"Her name was Pauline Felix. You have heard her story, Mrs. Waldeaux?"
"Yes" said Frances coldly. "I have heard her story. Can you find my shawl, George?"
But Perry was conscious of no rebuff, and turned cheerfully to George. "It was one of those dramas of real life, too unlikely to put into a novel. She was the daughter of a poor clergyman in Weir, a devout, good man, I believe. She had marvellous beauty and a devilish disposition. She ran away, lived a wild life in Paris, and became the mistress of a Russian Grand Duke. Her death----"
He could not have told why he stopped. Mrs. Waldeaux still watched him, attentive, but the sympathetic smile had frozen into icy civility. She had the old-fashioned modesty of her generation. What right had this young man to speak of "mistresses" to her? Clara's girls within hearing too! She rose when he paused, bowed, and hurried to them, like a hen fluttering to protect her chicks.
"He was talking to me of a woman," she said excitedly to Clara, "who is never mentioned by decent people."
"Yes, I heard him," said Miss Vance. "Poor Pauline! Her career was always a mystery to me. I was at school with her, and she was the most generous, lovable girl! Yet she came to a wretched end," turning to her flock, her tone growing didactic. "One is never safe, you see. One must always be on guard."
"Oh, my dear!" cried Frances impatiently. "You surely don't mean to class these girls and me with Pauline Felix! Come, come!"
"None of us is safe," repeated Clara stiffly. "Somebody says there is a possible vice in the purest soul, and it may lie perdu there until old age. But it will break out some day."
Mrs. Waldeaux looked, laughing, at the eager, blushing faces around her. "It is not likely to break out in us, girls, eh! Really, Clara," she said, in a lower tone, "that seems to me like wasted morality. Women of our class are in no more danger of temptation to commit great crimes than they are of finding tigers in their drawing-rooms. Pauline Felix was born vicious. No woman could fall as she did, who was not rotten to the core."
A sudden shrill laugh burst from the French woman, who had been looking at Mrs. Waldeaux with insolent, bold eyes. But as she laughed, her head fell forward and she swung from side to side.
"It is nothing," she cried, "I am only a little faint. I must go below."
The ship was now crossing short, choppy waves. The passengers scattered rapidly. George took his mother to her stateroom, and there she stayed until land was sighted on the Irish