The key to the heart of Paris is love. He whose key-ring lacks that open
sesame never really sees the city, even though he dwell in the shadow of
the Sorbonne and comprehend the _fiacre_ French of the Paris cabman.
Some there are who craftily open the door with a skeleton key; some who
ruthlessly batter the panels; some who achieve only a wax impression,
which proves to be useless. There are many who travel no farther than
the outer gates. You will find them staring blankly at the stone walls;
and their plaint is:
"What do they find to rave about in this town?"
Sophy Gold had been eight days in Paris and she had not so much as
peeked through the key-hole. In a vague way she realised that she was
seeing Paris as a blind man sees the sun--feeling its warmth, conscious
of its white light beating on the eyeballs, but never actually beholding
its golden glory.
This was Sophy Gold's first trip to Paris, and her heart and soul and
business brain were intent on buying the shrewdest possible bill of
lingerie and infants' wear for her department at Schiff Brothers',
Chicago; but Sophy under-estimated the powers of those three guiding
parts. While heart, soul, and brain were bent dutifully and
indefatigably on the lingerie and infants'-wear job they also were
registering a series of kaleidoscopic outside impressions.
As she drove from her hotel to the wholesale district, and from the
wholesale district to her hotel, there had flashed across her
consciousness the picture of the chic little modistes' models and
_ouvrières_ slipping out at noon to meet their lovers on the corner, to
sit over their _sirop_ or wine at some little near-by café, hands
clasped, eyes glowing.
Stepping out of the lift to ask for her room key, she had come on the
black-gowned floor clerk, deep in murmured conversation with the valet,
and she had seemed not to see Sophy at all as she groped subconsciously
for the key along the rows of keyboxes. She had seen the workmen in
their absurdly baggy corduroy trousers and grimy shirts strolling along
arm in arm with the women of their class--those untidy women with the
tidy hair. Bareheaded and happy, they strolled along, a strange contrast
to the glitter of the fashionable boulevard, stopping now and then to
gaze wide-eyed at a million-franc necklace in a jeweller's window; then
on again with a laugh and a shrug and a caress. She had seen the silent
couples in the Tuileries Gardens at twilight.
Once, in the Bois de Boulogne, a slim, sallow _élégant_ had bent for
what seemed an interminable time over a white hand that was stretched
from the window of a motor car. He was standing at the curb; in either
greeting or parting, and his eyes were fastened on other eyes within the
car even while his lips pressed the white hand.
Then one evening--Sophy reddened now at memory of it--she had turned a
quiet corner and come on a boy and a girl. The girl was shabby and
sixteen; the boy pale, voluble, smiling.
Evidently they were just parting. Suddenly, as she passed, the boy had
caught the girl in his arms there on the street corner in the daylight,
and had kissed her--not the quick, resounding smack of casual
leave-taking, but a long, silent kiss that left the girl limp.
Sophy stood rooted to the spot, between horror and fascination. The
boy's arm brought the girl upright and set her on her feet.
She took a long breath, straightened her hat, and ran on to rejoin her
girl friend awaiting her calmly up the street. She was not even flushed;
but Sophy was. Sophy was blushing hotly and burning uncomfortably, so
that her eyes smarted.
Just after her late dinner on the eighth day of her Paris stay, Sophy
Gold was seated in the hotel lobby. Paris thronged with American
business buyers--those clever, capable, shrewd-eyed women who swarm on
the city in June and strip it of its choicest flowers, from ball gowns
to back combs. Sophy tried to pick them from the multitude that swept
past her. It was not difficult. The women visitors to Paris in June
drop easily into their proper slots.
There were the pretty American girls and their marvellously
young-looking mammas, both out-Frenching the French in their efforts to
look Parisian; there were rows of fat, placid, jewel-laden Argentine
mothers, each with a watchful eye on her black-eyed, volcanically calm,
be-powdered daughter; and there were the buyers, miraculously dressy in
next week's styles in suits and hats--of the old-girl type most of them,
alert, self-confident, capable.
They usually returned to their hotels at six, limping a little,
dog-tired; but at sight of the brightly lighted, gay hotel foyer they
would straighten up like war-horses scenting battle and achieve an
effective entrance from the doorway to the lift.
In all that big, busy foyer Sophy Gold herself was the one person
distinctly out of the picture. One did not know where to place her. To
begin with, a woman as irrevocably, irredeemably ugly as Sophy was an
anachronism in Paris. She belonged to the gargoyle period. You found
yourself speculating on whether it was her mouth or her nose that made
her so devastatingly plain, only to bring up at her eyes and find that
they alone were enough to wreck any ambitions toward beauty. You knew
before you saw it that her hair would be limp and straggling.
You sensed without a glance at them that her hands would be bony, with
unlovely knuckles.
The Fates, grinning, had done all that. Her Chicago tailor and milliner
had completed the work. Sophy had not been in Paris ten minutes before
she noticed that they were wearing 'em long and full. Her coat was short
and her skirt scant. Her hat was small. The Paris windows were full of
large and graceful black velvets of the Lillian Russell school.
"May I sit here?"
Sophy looked up into the plump, pink, smiling face of one of those very
women of the buyer type on whom she had speculated ten minutes before--a
good-natured face with shrewd, twinkling eyes. At sight of it you
forgave her her skittish white-kid-topped shoes.
"Certainly," smiled Sophy, and moved over a bit on the little French
settee.
The plump woman sat down heavily. In five minutes Sophy was conscious
she was being stared at surreptitiously. In ten minutes she was
uncomfortably conscious of it. In eleven minutes she turned her head
suddenly and caught the stout woman's eyes fixed on her, with just the
baffled, speculative expression she had expected to find in them. Sophy
Gold had caught that look in many women's eyes. She smiled grimly now.
"Don't try it," she said, "It's no use."
The pink, plump face flushed pinker.
"Don't try--"
"Don't try to convince yourself that if I wore my hair differently, or
my collar tighter, or my hat larger, it would make a difference in my
looks. It wouldn't. It's hard to believe that I'm as homely as I look,
but I am. I've watched women try to dress me in as many as eleven mental
changes of costume before they gave me up."
"But I didn't mean--I beg your pardon--you mustn't think--"
"Oh, that's all right! I used to struggle, but I'm used to it now. It
took me a long time to realise that this was my real face and the only
kind I could ever expect to have."
The plump woman's kindly face grew kinder.
"But you're really not so--"
"Oh, yes, I am. Upholstering can't change me. There are various kinds of
homely women--some who are hideous in blue maybe, but who soften up in
pink. Then there's the one you read about, whose features are lighted up
now and then by one of those rare, sweet smiles that make her plain face
almost beautiful. But once in a while you find a woman who is ugly in
any colour of the rainbow; who is ugly smiling or serious, talking or in
repose, hair down low or hair done high--just plain dyed-in-the-wool,
sewed-in-the-seam homely. I'm that kind. Here for a visit?"
"I'm a buyer," said the plump woman.
"Yes; I thought so. I'm the lingerie and infants'-wear buyer for Schiff,
Chicago."
"A buyer!" The plump woman's eyes jumped uncontrollably again to Sophy
Gold's scrambled features. "Well! My name's Miss Morrissey--Ella
Morrissey. Millinery for Abelman's, Pittsburgh. And it's no snap this
year, with the shops showing postage-stamp hats one day and cart-wheels
the next. I said this morning that I envied the head of the tinware
department. Been over often?"