Madame de Treymes' friendly observation of her sister-in-law's
visitors resulted in no expression on her part of a desire to renew
her study of them. To all appearances, she passed out of their lives
when Madame de Malrive's door closed on her; and Durham felt that
the arduous task of making her acquaintance was still to be begun.
He felt also, more than ever, the necessity of attempting it; and in
his determination to lose no time, and his perplexity how to set
most speedily about the business, he bethought himself of applying
to his cousin Mrs. Boykin.
Mrs. Elmer Boykin was a small plump woman, to whose vague prettiness
the lines of middle-age had given no meaning: as though whatever had
happened to her had merely added to the sum total of her
inexperience. After a Parisian residence of twenty-five years, spent
in a state of feverish servitude to the great artists of the rue de
la Paix, her dress and hair still retained a certain rigidity in
keeping with the directness of her gaze and the unmodulated candour
of her voice. Her very drawing-room had the hard bright atmosphere
of her native skies, and one felt that she was still true at heart
to the national ideals in electric lighting and plumbing.
She and her husband had left America owing to the impossibility of
living there with the finish and decorum which the Boykin standard
demanded; but in the isolation of their exile they had created about
them a kind of phantom America, where the national prejudices
continued to flourish unchecked by the national progressiveness: a
little world sparsely peopled by compatriots in the same attitude of
chronic opposition toward a society chronically unaware of them. In
this uncontaminated air Mr. and Mrs. Boykin had preserved the purity
of simpler conditions, and Elmer Boykin, returning rakishly from a
Sunday's racing at Chantilly, betrayed, under his "knowing" coat and
the racing-glasses slung ostentatiously across his shoulder, the
unmistakeable cut of the American business man coming "up town"
after a long day in the office.
It was a part of the Boykins' uncomfortable but determined
attitude--and perhaps a last expression of their latent
patriotism--to live in active disapproval of the world about them,
fixing in memory with little stabs of reprobation innumerable
instances of what the abominable foreigner was doing; so that they
reminded Durham of persons peacefully following the course of a
horrible war by pricking red pins in a map. To Mrs. Durham, with her
gentle tourist's view of the European continent, as a vast Museum in
which the human multitudes simply furnished the element of costume,
the Boykins seemed abysmally instructed, and darkly expert in
forbidden things; and her son, without sharing her simple faith in
their omniscience, credited them with an ample supply of the kind of
information of which he was in search.
Mrs. Boykin, from the corner of an intensely modern Gobelin sofa,
studied her cousin as he balanced himself insecurely on one of the
small gilt chairs which always look surprised at being sat in.
"Fanny de Malrive? Oh, of course: I remember you were all very
intimate with the Frisbees when they lived in West Thirty-third
Street. But she has dropped all her American friends since her
marriage. The excuse was that de Malrive didn't like them; but as
she's been separated for five or six years, I can't see--. You say
she's been very nice to your mother and the girls? Well, I daresay
she is beginning to feel the need of friends she can really trust;
for as for her French relations--! That Malrive set is the worst in
the Faubourg. Of course you know what _he_ is; even the family, for
decency's sake, had to back her up, and urge her to get a
separation. And Christiane de Treymes--"