Madame de Treymes | Page 5

tree near which they had paused, saying reluctantly, as he did so: "Of course it was an immense pleasure to them to see you again."
"Oh, not in the same way. I mean--" she paused, sinking into the chair, and betraying, for the first time, a momentary inability to deal becomingly with the situation. "I mean," she resumed smiling, "that it was not an event for them, as it was for me."
"An event?" he caught her up again, eagerly; for what, in the language of any civilization, could that word mean but just the one thing he most wished it to?
"To be with dear, good, sweet, simple, real Americans again!" she burst out, heaping up her epithets with reckless prodigality.
Durham's smile once more faded to impersonality, as he rejoined, just a shade on the defensive: "If it's merely our Americanism you enjoyed--I've no doubt we can give you all you want in that line."
"Yes, it's just that! But if you knew what the word means to me! It means--it means--" she paused as if to assure herself that they were sufficiently isolated from the desultory groups beneath the other trees--"it means that I'm safe with them: as safe as in a bank!"
Durham felt a sudden warmth behind his eyes and in his throat. "I think I do know--"
"No, you don't, really; you can't know how dear and strange and familiar it all sounded: the old New York names that kept coming up in your mother's talk, and her charming quaint ideas about Europe--their all regarding it as a great big innocent pleasure ground and shop for Americans; and your mother's missing the home-made bread and preferring the American asparagus--I'm so tired of Americans who despise even their own asparagus! And then your married sister's spending her summers at--where is it?--the Kittawittany House on Lake Pohunk--"
A vision of earnest women in Shetland shawls, with spectacles and thin knobs of hair, eating blueberry pie at unwholesome hours in a shingled dining-room on a bare New England hill-top, rose pallidly between Durham and the verdant brightness of the Champs Elysees, and he protested with a slight smile: "Oh, but my married sister is the black sheep of the family--the rest of us never sank as low as that."
"Low? I think it's beautiful--fresh and innocent and simple. I remember going to such a place once. They have early dinner--rather late--and go off in buckboards over terrible roads, and bring back golden rod and autumn leaves, and read nature books aloud on the piazza; and there is always one shy young man in flannels--only one--who has come to see the prettiest girl (though how he can choose among so many!) and who takes her off in a buggy for hours and hours--" She paused and summed up with a long sigh: "It is fifteen years since I was in America."
"And you're still so good an American."
"Oh, a better and better one every day!"
He hesitated. "Then why did you never come back?"
Her face altered instantly, exchanging its retrospective light for the look of slightly shadowed watchfulness which he had known as most habitual to it.
"It was impossible--it has always been so. My husband would not go; and since--since our separation--there have been family reasons."
Durham sighed impatiently. "Why do you talk of reasons? The truth is, you have made your life here. You could never give all this up!" He made a discouraged gesture in the direction of the Place de la Concorde.
"Give it up! I would go tomorrow! But it could never, now, be for more than a visit. I must live in France on account of my boy."
Durham's heart gave a quick beat. At last the talk had neared the point toward which his whole mind was straining, and he began to feel a personal application in her words. But that made him all the more cautious about choosing his own.
"It is an agreement--about the boy?" he ventured.
"I gave my word. They knew that was enough," she said proudly; adding, as if to put him in full possession of her reasons: "It would have been much more difficult for me to obtain complete control of my son if it had not been understood that I was to live in France."
"That seems fair," Durham assented after a moment's reflection: it was his instinct, even in the heat of personal endeavour, to pause a moment on the question of "fairness." The personal claim reasserted itself as he added tentatively: "But when he is brought up--when he's grown up: then you would feel freer?"
She received this with a start, as a possibility too remote to have entered into her view of the future. "He is only eight years old!" she objected.
"Ah, of course it would be a long way off?"
"A long way off, thank heaven! French mothers part late