“You smell of whisky! Atrociously! Now please hurry and dress! Captain Gioserro and you and I are going to the theater. Now please hurry, can’t you? I’ll order the cocktails meanwhile. As you see, I’m all ready. After the theater, we’ll meet Renée de Pénable and some other people and dance.”
As he dressed, Sam fretted, “French play! Humph! I won’t know which is the husband and which is the lover for at least the first two acts!”
If he slept at the play, he did it ever so modestly and retiringly, and he was unusually polite to Madame de Pénable. Fran was approving on their way home, and quite as easily as though they were back in Zenith, he asserted while they were undressing:
“Fran, I’ve got an idea that—”
“Just unfasten this snap on my shoulder-strap, would you mind? Thanks. You were so nice tonight. Much the best-looking man in the room!”
“That’s—”
“And I’m so glad you’ve come to like Renée de Pénable. She’s really a darling—so loyal. But, uh—Sam, I do wish you hadn’t brought up that question as to what right the French have in the Riff.”
“But, my God, they talked about us in Haiti and Nicaragua first!”
“I know, but that’s entirely different. This is an ancient question, and of course Renée was shocked, and so was that English woman, Mrs. What’s-her-name. But it doesn’t matter. I just thought I’d mention it.”
And he’d thought he’d behaved so beautifully tonight!
“But,” he went on heavily, becoming dimly irritated as he noted how little she heeded him while she brushed her hair, “I wanted to suggest that—Look here, Fran, I’ve got kind of an idea. It’s almost May, but we could get in a month or more on the Mediterranean and still have time to get home late in June, and then I could go to my class reunion—thirtieth—
“Really? Thirtieth?”
“Oh, I’m not so old! But I mean: we haven’t talked especially about when we would go home—”
“But I want to see a lot more of Europe. Oh, I haven’t started!”
“Neither have I. I agree. But I just mean: there’s several business things I ought to settle up at home, and there’s this reunion, and I’d like to see Emily and her new home, and Brent—”
“But perhaps we could get them to come over here this summer. Would you mind handing me the cold cream that’s in the bathroom—no—no—I think it’s on the bureau—oh, thanks—”
“I thought we could go home for just a couple months, or maybe three, and then start out again. Say go West this time, and sail for China and Japan and round to Rangoon and India and so on.”
“Yes, I’d like to do that sometime. … Oh, dear, how sleepy I am! … But not now, of course, now that we know nice people here.”
“But that’s just what I mean! I don’t—Oh, they’re a lively bunch, and lots of ’em good families and so on, but I don’t think they are nice.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean they’re a bunch of wasters. All they do, Pénable and her whole gang, and Atkins’s hangers-on aren’t much better, all they do is just dance and chatter and show off their clothes. Their idea of a good time is just about that of a chorus-girl—”
Fran had been inattentive. She wasn’t now. She snatched up a lace wrap, slapped it about her shoulders over her nightgown, and faced him, like a snarling white cat:
“Sam! Let’s get this straight. I’ve felt you’ve been sulking, that you’ve been too afraid to—”
“Too polite!”
“—say what you thought. Well, I’m sick and tired of having to apologize, yes, to apologize, for the crime of having introduced you to some of the nicest and most amusing people in Paris, and for having backed you up when they were offended by your boorishness! Am I to understand that you regard Madame de Pénable and her whole gang, as you so elegantly call it, as simply rotters? May I point out to you that if I don’t have quite so lively an appreciation of such nature’s noblemen as Mr. A. B. Hurd—”
“Fran!”
“—yet possibly I may be a little better equipped to understand really smart, cosmopolitan people than you are! Kindly let me remind you that Renée de Pénable is the intimate friend of the most exclusive aristocracy of the ancien régime here—”
“But is she? And what of it?”
“Will you kindly stop sneering? You that are so fond of accusing me of sneering! And, my dear Samuel, you really don’t do it so very well! Delicate irony isn’t your long suit, my dear good man!”
“Damn it, I won’t be talked to like a stable boy!”
“Then don’t act like one! And if I may be permitted to go on and answer the charges which you brought up, not I—the whole subject is thoroughly distasteful to me—and oh, Sam, so vulgar, so beastly vulgar!” For a second she was dramatically mournful and hurt, but instantly she was a charging Cossack again: “But when you attack anyone that’s been as sweet to me as Renée, all I can say is—Do you happen to realize that she is the dearest friend of the Duchesse de Quatrefleurs—she’s promised to take me down to the Duchesse’s château in Burgundy—”
“She’s never done it!”
“As it happens, the Duchesse is ill, just at the moment! And your charming remark illustrates perfectly what I mean by your sneering! … Or, to take the example of Renée’s friend, Mrs. Sittingwall. She’s the widow of a very distinguished English general who was killed in the war—”
“He wasn’t a general—he was a colonel—and now the woman is engaged to that old rip of a French stockbroker, Andillet.”
“What of it? M. Andillet does dress too loudly, and he drives a car too fast, but he’s a most amusing
