Grey Roses | Page 8

brush and
palette, and great dabs of colour were clinging to her cloak. While he
was doing penance, scrubbing the garment with rags soaked in
turpentine, he kept shaking his head, and murmuring, from time to time,
as he glanced up at her, 'Well, I'll be dumned.'
'It's very nice and polite of you, Chalks,' she said, by and by, 'a very
graceful concession to my sex. But, if you think it would relieve you
once for all, you have my full permission to pronounce it --amned.'

Chalks did no more work that afternoon; and that evening quite twenty
of us dined at Madame Chanve's; and it was almost like old times.
VIII.
'Oh, yes,' she explained to me afterwards, 'my uncle is a good man. My
aunt and cousins are very good women. But for me, to live with
them--pas possible, mon cher. Their thoughts were not my thoughts, we
could not speak the same language. They disapproved of me
unutterably. They suffered agonies, poor things. Oh, they were very
kind, very patient. But--! My gods were their devils. My father--my
great, grand, splendid father--was "poor Alfred," "poor uncle Alfred."
Que voulez-vous? And then--the life, the society! The parishioners--the
people who came to tea--the houses where we sometimes dined! Are
you interested in crops? In the preservation of game? In the diseases of
cattle? Olàlà! (C'est bien le cas de s'en servir, de cette expression-là.)
Olàlà, làlà! And then--have you ever been homesick? Oh, I longed, I
pined, for Paris, as one suffocating would long, would die, for air.
Enfin, I could not stand it any longer. They thought it wicked to smoke
cigarettes. My poor aunt--when she smelt cigarette-smoke in my
bed-room! Oh, her face! I had to sneak away, behind the shrubbery at
the end of the garden, for stealthy whiffs. And it was impossible to get
French tobacco. At last I took the bull by the horns, and fled. It will
have been a terrible shock for them. But better one good blow than
endless little ones; better a lump-sum than instalments with interest.'
But what was she going to do? How was she going to live? For, after
all, much as she loved Paris, she couldn't subsist on its air and sunshine.
'Oh, never fear! I'll manage somehow. I'll not die of hunger,' she said
confidently.
IX.
And, sure enough, she managed very well. She gave music lessons to
the children of the Quarter, and English lessons to clerks and shop girls;
she did a little translating; she would pose now and then for a painter
friend--she was the original, for instance, of Norton's 'Woman

Dancing,' which you know. She even--thanks to the employment by
Chalks of what he called his 'inflooence'--she even contributed a
weekly column of Paris gossip to the Palladium, a newspaper
published at Battle Creek, Michigan, U.S.A., Chalks's native town. 'Put
in lots about me, and talk as if there were only two important centres of
civilisation on earth, Battle Crick and Parus, and it'll be a boom,'
Chalks said. We used to have great fun, concocting those columns of
Paris gossip. Nina, indeed, held the pen and cast a deciding vote; but
we all collaborated. And we put in lots about Chalks--perhaps rather
more than he had bargained for. With an irony (we trusted) too subtle
to be suspected by the good people of Battle Creek, we would
introduce their illustrious fellow-citizen, casually, between the Pope
and the President of the Republic; we would sketch him as he strolled
in the Boulevard arm-in-arm with Monsieur Meissonier, as he dined
with the Perpetual Secretary of the French Academy, or drank his bock
in the afternoon with the Grand Chancellor of the Legion of Honour;
we would compose solemn descriptive criticisms of his works, which
almost made us die of laughing; we would interview him--at
length--about any subject; we would give elaborate bulletins of his
health, and brilliant pen-pictures of his toilets. Sometimes we would
betroth him, marry him, divorce him; sometimes, when our muse
impelled us to a particularly daring flight, we would insinuate, darkly,
sorrowfully, that perhaps the great man's morals ... but no! We were
persuaded that rumour accused him falsely. The story that he had been
seen dancing at Bullier's with the notorious Duchesse de Z---- was a
baseless fabrication. Unprincipled? Oh, we were nothing if not
unprincipled. And our pleasure was so exquisite, and it worried our
victim so. 'I suppose you think it's funny, don't you?' he used to ask,
with a feint of superior scorn which put its fine flower to our hilarity.
'Look out, or you'll bust,' he would warn us, the only unconvulsed
member present. 'By gum, you're easily amused.' We always wrote of
him respectfully as Mr. Charles K. Smith; we never faintly hinted