Grey Roses | Page 9

in some disarray, a spiral of cigarette-smoke winding ceilingward from between the fingers of her idle hand, her lips parted, her eyes gleaming with mischievous inspirations, her face pale with the intensity of her glee. I can see her as she would look up, eagerly, to listen to somebody's suggestion, or as she would motion to us to be silent, crying, 'Attendez--I've got an idea.' Then her pen would dash swiftly, noisily, over her paper for a little, whilst we all waited expectantly; and at last she would lean back, drawing a long breath, and tossing the pen aside, to read her paragraph out to us.
In a word, she managed very well, and by no means died of hunger. She could scarcely afford Madame Chanve's three-franc table d'h?te, it is true; but we could dine modestly at L��on's, over the way, and return to the Bleu for coffee,--though, it must be added, that establishment no longer enjoyed a monopoly of our custom. We patronised it and the Vachette, the Source, the Ecoles, the Souris, indifferently. Or we would sometimes spend our evenings in Nina's rooms. She lived in a tremendously swagger house in the Avenue de l'Observatoire,--on the sixth floor, to be sure, but 'there was a carpet all the way up.' She had a charming little salon, with her own furniture and piano (the same that had formerly embellished our caf��), and no end of books, pictures, draperies, and pretty things, inherited from her father or presented by her friends.
By this time the inevitable had happened, and we were all in love with her,--hopelessly, resignedly so, and without internecine rancour, for she treated us, indiscriminately, with a serene, impartial, tolerant, derision; but we were savagely, luridly, jealous and suspicious of all new-comers and of all outsiders. If we could not win her, no one else should; and we formed ourselves round her in a ring of fire. Oh, the maddening, mock-sentimental, mock-sympathetic face she would pull, when one of us ventured to sigh to her of his passion! The way she would lift her eyebrows, and gaze at you with a travesty of pity, shaking her head pensively, and murmuring, 'Mon pauvre ami! Only fancy!' And then how the imp, lurking in the corners of her eyes, with only the barest pretence of trying to conceal himself, would suddenly leap forth in a peal of laughter! She had lately read Mr. Howells's 'Undiscovered Country,' and had adopted the Shakers' paraphrase for love: 'Feeling foolish.'--'Feeling pretty foolish to-day, air ye, gentlemen?' she inquired, mimicking the dialect of Chalks. 'Well, I guess you just ain't feeling any more foolish than you look.'--If she would but have taken us seriously! And the worst of it was that we knew she was anything but temperamentally cold. Chalks formulated the potentialities we divined in her, when he remarked, regretfully, wistfully, as he often did, 'She could love like Hell.' Once, in a reckless moment, he even went so far as to tell her this pointblank. 'Oh, naughty Chalks!' she remonstrated, shaking her finger at him. 'Do you think that's a pretty word? But--I dare say I could.'
'All the same, Lord help the man you marry,' Chalks continued gloomily.
'Oh, I shall never marry,' Nina cried. 'Because, first, I don't approve of matrimony as an institution. And then--as you say--Lord help my husband. I should be such an uncomfortable wife. So capricious, and flighty, and tantalising, and unsettling, and disobedient, and exacting, and everything. Oh, but a horrid wife! No, I shall never marry. Marriage is quite too out-of-date. I shan't marry; but, if I ever meet a man and love him--ah!' She placed two fingers upon her lips, and kissed them, and waved the kiss to the skies.
This fragment of conversation passed in the Luxembourg Garden; and the three or four of us by whom she was accompanied glared threateningly at our mental image of that not-impossible upstart whom she might some day meet and love. We were sure, of course, that he would be a beast; we hated him not merely because he would have cut us out with her, but because he would be so distinctly our inferior, so hopelessly unworthy of her, so helplessly incapable of appreciating her. I think we conceived of him as tall, with drooping fair moustaches, and contemptibly meticulous in his dress. He would probably not be of the Quarter; he would sneer at us.
'He'll not understand her, he'll not respect her. Take her peculiar views. We know where she gets them. But he--he'll despise her for them, at the very time he's profiting by 'em,' some one said.
Her peculiar views of the institution of matrimony, the speaker meant. She had got them from her father. 'The relations of the sexes should be as free as friendship,' he