But he wearied of Princess Maravigliarsi’s chatter. It was so important that he see Trouville and Biarritz; it was so important that he properly hate the Bolsheviks; so important that he go to tea at Lady Ingraham’s.
He dreaded these new obligations.
“So far as I can see,” he brooded, “travel consists in perpetually finding new things that you have to do if you’re going to be respectable.”
Fran was polite to the Princess Maravigliarsi with a cold politeness which indicated to Sam that she was impressed. But it was to a certain Madame de Pénable that she gave most of her attention. Madame de Pénable was a redheaded, white-skinned, rather plump woman who seemed to specialize on knowing everybody of influence in every land. The Dodsworths never learned whether she was born in Poland, Nebraska, Africa, the Dordogne, or Hungary. They never learned just who Monsieur de Pénable was, if there ever had been a Monsieur de Pénable. They never learned whether she was in trade, living on alimony, or possessed of a family income. Sam suspected that she was an international spy. She was a pleasant woman, and very clever. She talked about herself constantly, and never told anything whatever about herself. She spoke English, French, German, and Italian perfectly, and at restaurants, with waiters as mysterious as herself, she went off into tongues which might have been Russian, Lancashire, or Modern Greek.
Apparently she fancied the Dodsworths as additions to her circle. Sam heard her inviting Fran and himself to lunch at the Ermitage.
“Fran is launched,” he sighed. “At last we’ll be gay and cosmopolitan! I wonder how much I’ll be able to win from Tub at poker, now that I’ve had my style of playing perfected by European culture?”
XV
They ceased to be children exploring together, rather happy in their loneliness. They were dominated by Endicott Everett Atkins and Madame de Pénable and their smart groups. Madame de Pénable saw that because in her fresh, keen, naive way Fran was different from European women, she was the more novel and attractive to the innumerable European men whom the De Pénable always had about her, running her errands, drinking her excellent Moselle, listening to her scandalous anecdotes; she saw also that Sam was likely to keep Fran from snatching such of these men as the De Pénable wanted to hold for her own.
She cultivated the Dodsworths enthusiastically.
Fran’s life became hectic as life can be only in Paris: a ride in the Bois, lunch, shopping, tea, bridge, cocktails, dressing, dinner, the theater, dancing at such icily glittering haunts as the Jardin de Ma Soeur, cold cream and exhausted sleep. In between she managed to fit three hours a week of French lessons.
And Sam—he came along.
He enjoyed it, for a month. There was color to this life, and motion, like waves under the gray cliff that was Paris. There were pretty women who took him seriously, as one of the financial captains of America (he suspected, with an inward chuckle, that they thought him far richer than he was). There were gorgeous clothes and marvelous food. He learned something of the art of wine. He had long known that Rhine wines should be cold; that Burgundy is better than that womanish drink, champagne. But now, meeting people who took wine as seriously as he had motor engines, and listening to their reverent discussion of it, he learned the epochal differences between the several Burgundies—between Nuits St. Georges and Nuits-Prémeaux; the cataclysmic differences between vintages—between the lordly crop of 1911 and the mediocre product of 1912. He learned that it was a crime to dull the palate with a cocktail before a sacred bottle of good wine, and that it was bloody treason to heat Burgundy suddenly by plunging it in the hot water, instead of decently decanting it hours before drinking and letting—it—come—slowly (the connoisseurs breathed)—to—room—temperature.
It interested him, this cyclone of new excitements. And Fran was, for the first time in years, altogether satisfied.
Between them, Atkins and the De Pénable knew a dozen sets. Atkins fished for portrait painters, French critics, American ladies from the choicer portions of Back Bay and Rittenhouse Square, English poets who pretended to be biologists and English biologists who were flattered at being taken for poets. Madame de Pénable went in for assorted titles—a judicious mixture of Italians, French, Romanian, Georgian, Hungarian—and she always had one sound, carefully selected freak: a delightfully droll pickpocket or a minor Arctic explorer.
The man out of all this boiling whom Fran most liked was an Italian aviator, Captain Gioserro, a bright-eyed, very smiling man, ten years younger than herself. He was dazzled by her; bewildered by her quick speech. He said that she was the Norse goddess, Freya, that she was an Easter lily, and a number of other highly elegant things, and she liked it and went riding with him.
Sam hoped that there was not going to be another Lockert explosion. He believed her when she insisted that she considered Gioserro a “mere boy.” But alone, brooding, he was worried. He wondered if her rigid distaste for flirtation had existed only because she had not found American men attractive. She seemed softer, more relaxed, more lovely, and considerably less dependent on him. She was surrounded by amusing men, and warmed by their extravagant compliments. His conscious self declared that she couldn’t possibly be tempted, but his subconscious self was alarmed.
And presently he became weary of their insane dashing. The voices—the voices that never ceased—the high thin laughter—the reference to Mike This and Jacques That and the amours of Lady the Other—the duty of being seen at every exhibition, every select tea, every concert—
Fran had sharply dropped for him the people they knew, all the low adventurers who sat
