Why had it not happened to Fanny Frisbee?
Durham put the question to himself as he walked back along the
quays, in a state of inner commotion which left him, for once,
insensible to the ordered beauty of his surroundings. Propinquity
had not been lacking: he had known Miss Frisbee since his college
days. In unsophisticated circles, one family is apt to quote
another; and the Durham ladies had always quoted the Frisbees. The
Frisbees were bold, experienced, enterprising: they had what the
novelists of the day called "dash." The beautiful Fanny was
especially dashing; she had the showiest national attributes,
tempered only by a native grace of softness, as the beam of her eyes
was subdued by the length of their lashes. And yet young Durham,
though not unsusceptible to such charms, had remained content to
enjoy them from a safe distance of good fellowship. If he had been
asked why, he could not have told; but the Durham of forty
understood. It was because there were, with minor modifications,
many other Fanny Frisbees; whereas never before, within his ken, had
there been a Fanny de Malrive.
He had felt it in a flash, when, the autumn before, he had run
across her one evening in the dining-room of the Beaurivage at
Ouchy; when, after a furtive exchange of glances, they had
simultaneously arrived at recognition, followed by an eager pressure
of hands, and a long evening of reminiscence on the starlit terrace.
She was the same, but so mysteriously changed! And it was the
mystery, the sense of unprobed depths of initiation, which drew him
to her as her freshness had never drawn him. He had not hitherto
attempted to define the nature of the change: it remained for his
sister Nannie to do that when, on his return to the Rue de Rivoli,
where the family were still sitting in conclave upon their recent
visitor, Miss Durham summed up their groping comments in the phrase:
"I never saw anything so French!"
Durham, understanding what his sister's use of the epithet implied,
recognized it instantly as the explanation of his own feelings. Yes,
it was the finish, the modelling, which Madame de Malrive's
experience had given her that set her apart from the fresh
uncomplicated personalities of which she had once been simply the
most charming type. The influences that had lowered her voice,
regulated her gestures, toned her down to harmony with the warm dim
background of a long social past--these influences had lent to her
natural fineness of perception a command of expression adapted to
complex conditions. She had moved in surroundings through which one
could hardly bounce and bang on the genial American plan without
knocking the angles off a number of sacred institutions; and her
acquired dexterity of movement seemed to Durham a crowning grace. It
was a shock, now that he knew at what cost the dexterity had been
acquired, to acknowledge this even to himself; he hated to think
that she could owe anything to such conditions as she had been
placed in. And it gave him a sense of the tremendous strength of the
organization into which she had been absorbed, that in spite of her
horror, her moral revolt, she had not reacted against its external
forms. She might abhor her husband, her marriage, and the world to
which it had introduced her, but she had become a product of that
world in its outward expression, and no better proof of the fact was
needed than her exotic enjoyment of Americanism.
The sense of the distance to which her American past had been
removed was never more present to him than when, a day or two later,
he went with his mother and sisters to return her visit. The region
beyond the river existed, for the Durham ladies, only as the
unmapped environment of the Bon Marche; and Nannie Durham's
exclamation on the pokiness of the streets and the dulness of the
houses showed Durham, with a start, how far he had already travelled
from the family point of view.
"Well, if this is all she got by marrying a Marquis!" the young lady
summed up as they paused before the small sober hotel in its
high-walled court; and Katy, following her mother through the
stone-vaulted and stone-floored vestibule, murmured: "It must be
simply freezing in winter."
In the softly-faded drawing-room, with its old pastels in old
frames, its windows looking on the damp green twilight of a garden
sunk deep in blackened walls, the American ladies might have been
even more conscious of the insufficiency of their friend's
compensations, had not the warmth of her welcome precluded all other
reflections. It was not till she had gathered them about her in the
corner beside the tea-table, that Durham identified the slender dark
lady loitering negligently in the background, and introduced in a
comprehensive murmur to the American group, as the redoubtable
sister-in-law to whom he had declared himself ready to throw down
his challenge.
There was nothing very redoubtable about Madame de Treymes, except
perhaps the kindly yet critical observation which she bestowed on
her sister-in-law's visitors: the unblinking attention of a
civilized spectator observing an encampment of aborigines. He had
heard of her as a beauty, and was surprised to find her, as Nannie
afterward put it, a mere stick to hang clothes on (but they _did_
hang!), with a small brown glancing face, like that of a charming
little inquisitive animal. Yet before she had addressed ten words to
him--nibbling at the hard English consonants like nuts--he owned the
justice of the epithet. She was a beauty, if beauty, instead of
being restricted to the cast of the face, is a pervasive attribute
informing the hands, the voice, the gestures, the very fall of a
flounce and tilt of a feather. In this impalpable _aura_ of grace
Madame de Treymes' dark meagre presence unmistakably moved, like a
thin flame in a wide quiver of light. And as he realized that she
looked much handsomer than she was, so while they talked, he felt
that she understood a great deal more than she betrayed. It was not
through the groping speech which formed their apparent medium of
communication that she imbibed her information: she found it in the
air, she extracted it from Durham's look and manner, she caught it
in the turn of her sister-in-law's defenseless eyes--for in her
presence Madame de Malrive became Fanny Frisbee again!--she put it
together, in short, out of just such unconsidered indescribable
trifles as differentiated the quiet felicity of her dress from
Nannie and Katy's "handsome" haphazard clothes.
Her actual converse with Durham moved, meanwhile, strictly in the
conventional ruts: had he been long in Paris, which of the new plays
did he like best, was it true that American _jeunes filles_ were
sometimes taken to the Boulevard theatres? And she threw an
interrogative glance at the young ladies beside the tea-table. To
Durham's reply that it depended how much French they knew, she
shrugged and smiled, replying that his compatriots all spoke French
like Parisians, enquiring, after a moment's thought, if they learned
it, _la bas, des negres_, and laughing heartily when Durham's
astonishment revealed her blunder.
When at length she had taken leave--enveloping the Durham ladies in
a last puzzled penetrating look--Madame de Malrive turned to Mrs.
Durham with a faintly embarrassed smile.
"My sister-in-law was much interested; I believe you are the first
Americans she has ever known."
"Good gracious!" ejaculated Nannie, as though such social darkness
required immediate missionary action on some one's part.
"Well, she knows _us_," said Durham, catching in Madame de Malrive's
rapid glance, a startled assent to his point.
"After all," reflected the accurate Katy, as though seeking an
excuse for Madame de Treymes' unenlightenment, "_we_ don't know
many French people, either."
To which Nannie promptly if obscurely retorted: "Ah, but we couldn't
and _she_ could!"